Sep 25 2023

Vivian Van Tassel And The Secret Of Midnight Lake by Michael Witwer

Vivian Van Tassel is an angry young teen. Part of this is justified: her mom recently died and she blames herself. But as we quickly learn, Vivian has had a temper for a while (and as a parent, I’m genuinely concerned that she’s never been in therapy for this, either before or after what happened to her mom.)

Anyway, it doesn’t help her any when her journalist father decides they ought to leave their Chicago home and move back to her mom’s hometown of Midnight Lake, Wisconsin. Her mom’s ancestral home is falling down and her hapless father has little clue how to fix anything, and has taken a significant pay cut to come work at the local paper besides. Starting at the middle school is awkward enough even without the popular Amber Grausman deciding she hates Vivian. The school is a converted sanatorium, and the teachers almost uniformly mean. The few bright sparks are an understanding history teacher named Miss Greenleaf and a group of welcoming nerds who play the role-playing game Beasts & Battlements (B&B for short) that was actually written and designed in Midnight Lake decades ago by the late Garrison Arnold.

When Miss Greenleaf assigns the kids to research various local institutions to drive home the impact of history on the living, Vivian begins to learn a lot more about the curious past of Midnight Lake. Worryingly, she begins to see parallels between historical incidents and the goings-on in the B&B game she’s been reluctantly observing. As people start to go missing and dead creatures begin to mysteriously appear, Vivian will find herself plunged deeper into the secrets of her new home, even as her own bad temper continues to get in her way.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/09/25/vivian-van-tassel-and-the-secret-of-midnight-lake-by-michael-witwer/

Sep 24 2023

Schloss Gripsholm by Kurt Tucholsky

In Schloss Gripsholm (Castle Gripsholm) Kurt Tucholsky, one of Weimar Germany’s leading journalists and satirists tells of a summer idyll in Sweden, several weeks with a lady friend where they while the days away, a couple of friends come to visit, and various amusements take place. The book begins with a putative exchange of letters between Tucholsky and his publisher, in which they haggle over royalties and the publisher asks him for a love story. Tucholsky replies that he’s walking out the door to go to Sweden, he could maybe manage a summer story. And thus does Schloss Gripsholm acquire its subtitle: A Summer Story.

Schloss Gripsholm by Kurt Tucholsky

After placating and provoking his publishers, Tucholsky, in his guise as first-person narrator, picks up his friend and lover Lydia, whom he generally calls “the Princess,” and they dash for the train to Copenhagen. Thence to Sweden where they spend a few days searching out a place to stay with the help of a local guide who’s facile, if not fluent, in numerous languages. He speaks German to Tucholsky and the Princess, but with a strong American accent and long rolling R’s. He lets them in on the secret of being a guide for visiting Americans: give them lots of numbers. The numbers don’t have to be true, they just have to be delivered with confidence and sincerity. Tucholsky then riffs on the whole concept, inventing histories for the buildings they see and the people who cross their path. Does it matter if any of it is true? Not on a summer holiday.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/09/24/schloss-gripsholm-by-kurt-tucholsky/

Sep 21 2023

Sea Serpent’s Heir, Book Two: Black Wave by Mairghread Scott & Pablo Túnica

What a vast and welcome improvement on the tepid first volume! In fairness, that compliment applies strictly to the story, as Pablo Tunica’s art has been excellent from the very beginning. His illustrations are as consistently kinetic and majestic and grotesque as the sea and its inhabitants, truly leaning in to the weird, hardscrabble nature of this fantasy pirate-oriented setting.

My main beef with Book One was how irritating the main character Aella was, and how her family had done nothing to prepare her for the risks of growing up. You don’t protect a child by giving her none of the tools she’ll need to survive as an adult, y’all. In Book One, Aella was basically a spoiled, sheltered ninny who was easy prey for the Church Of The First Light when they finally found her. Good thing she has monstrous powers! By the end of the book, she’d managed to escape their clutches, but at a terrible cost.

Book Two: Black Wave opens with Aella grieving the death of the Queen Of Mercy, even as her mother’s lieutenants worry about keeping their defenses afloat and Aella herself protected. The demon sea serpent Xir goads Aella into seeking revenge, but Aella refuses… until the issue is forced upon her by an attack of assassins from the Empty Court. In order to avoid death — both her own and her beloved crew’s — Aella must embrace the demon inside her.

While her lieutenants see the attack as a threat, Aella and Xir see it as an invitation. Swiftly, they forge alliances with the three other major powers of their realm in a united front against the Church. So what if the current ruler of the Empty Court is demanding a price that probably should not be paid?

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/09/21/sea-serpents-heir-book-two-black-wave-by-mairghread-scott-pablo-tunica/

Sep 19 2023

A Pocket Guide To Tarot Card Archetypes by Abbi Clark

for When You Don’t Want to Carry Around a Library, as its subtitle suggests.

I ordered this handy little zine when I backed Gerta Oparaku Edy’s Divine Deco Tarot on Kickstarter. I loved how the deck was inspired by both Art Deco and by the author’s Albanian heritage, but was a little disappointed that there was no interpretation booklet included. Hence I decided to add this inexpensive guide, published by the same people as the Tarot deck, to my cart.

It’s certainly a pocket-sized volume, tho I think a stronger layout choice would have been to have it more closely adhere to the size of a Tarot deck instead of the 5″x6″ format it comes in. That’s a very small quibble tho, as it’s nicely lightweight and portable. Bonus: the paper has a lovely hand feel, inside and out.

What I most appreciate about the contents are the fast and easy groupings. Here, the card explanations go by Major Arcana and then Card Values (e.g. Aces, Twos etc) before finishing with the court cards, which really speeds up the process of finding what you need. It also helps that, devoid of the need to explain art or symbolism, the meaning of each card in its Upright or Reversed positions can be distilled to a single line each.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/09/19/a-pocket-guide-to-tarot-card-archetypes-by-abbi-clark/

Sep 18 2023

Not A New York Love Story by Julian Voloj & Andreas Gefe

I finished this terrific graphic novel and said out loud, “They should turn this into a movie!” Honestly, it’s the kind of story that I love to see on film: beautiful, visual, meaningful. Bonus for having an editor who can pace it better than my reading speed does, and a director who knows how to set it to music. A movie of this book could be extraordinary.

Not A New York Love Story is both an homage to New York City and a bittersweet examination of the end of a romance. The unnamed protagonist is grieving the death of his partner following a horrific accident. He’s trying to go about his daily life, and even goes to therapy to cope, but when she actually manifests in their kitchen one evening, he’s completely thrown. She’s dead, he knows she’s dead, but she feels very much alive as they have dinner and talk. He wakes in the morning alone, and bereft.

His therapist suggests taking time off work and seeing friends instead, but as the days go by, the appearances of his late partner increase in frequency and intensity. He tries to ignore her, tries to reason her appearances away, but when he finally gives in one day, finds himself going with her on a tour of parts of the city they’d never had time to visit together while she was still alive. Is she a ghost, or just a manifestation of his longing made tangible by the power of his grief? And what will happen when the strength of his memories of her inevitably begin to fade?

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/09/18/not-a-new-york-love-story-by-julian-voloj-andreas-gefe/

Sep 17 2023

The Furthest Station by Ben Aaronovitch

Odd reports from the Metropolitan Line of the London Underground have come to the attention of Peter Grant and the Special Assessment Unit he’s a part of. They’ve come through as part of a project to deal with sexual assaults and offensive behavior on the transport system, and part of that was “improving reporting rates for those offences, which meant convincing victims we were taking them seriously. So when you get a cluster of complaints about assaults by ‘a man who wasn’t there’ you don’t just bin them. You pass them to the people who are responsible for weird shit, i.e., me and [Sergeant] Jaget [Kumar].” (p. 6) Wait a minute. “‘A man who wasn’t there?’ I said.” (p. 6) Indeed. Five reports of people being variously pushed, groped, shouted at or racially abused. Common element: no apparent perpetrator.

Furthest Station by Ben Aaronovitch

“Where it got weird was in the follow ups.” (p. 6) Not only was there no apparent perpetrator, the victims denied having made any calls from their mobiles to the police, despite logs on both the phones and from the police, as well as transcripts of the conversations. Officers who made later follow-up visits said they believed the victims genuinely had no recollection of the incidents. A detail that caught my eye was archaic, or at least peculiar, language used by the assailant. One transcript mentioned a victim being called a “Saracen,” for example. Those peculiarities and the lack of apparent connections or intimidation make it look even more like a case for Peter and company. When Jaget asks for his official view, he gives another flash of the bureaucratic jargon so lovingly mentioned in Foxglove Summer: “We at the Folly have embraced the potentialities of modern policing.” (p. 8)

With that, they’re off. Ghost-hunting on the Metropolitan line. Fortunately, Peter and Jaget spot a disturbance on a train the very first morning of their search. By the time they make their way through the cars, whatever-it-is has already happened. Aaronovitch shows a bit of police procedure by way of setting the stage for the supernatural. The two have figured out which passenger was the victim, a young white woman who

caught my eye because not only was her face flushed, but she kept sneaking looks at us and then pretending to be madly interested in her Kindle.
Me and Jaget did some professional looming until we’d cleared enough space for me to crouch down and, in my best non-intimidating voice, ask whether she was alright. In case you’re wondering, that blokey sing-song timbre with a reassuring touch of regional — in my case cockney — accent is entirely deliberate. We actually practise it in front of a mirror. It’s designed to convey the message that we’re totally friendly, customer-facing modern police officers who have nothing but your wellbeing at the core of our mission statement — but nonetheless we are not going to go away until you talk to us. Sorry, but that’s just how we roll. (p. 3)

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/09/17/the-furthest-station-by-ben-aaronovitch/

Sep 16 2023

Memoirs of the Polish Baroque by Jan Chryzostom Pasek

More properly: The Writings of Jan Chryzostom Pasek, a Squire of the Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania edited, translated, with an introduction and notes by Catherine S. Leach because a title appropriate to the era is important.

If Sir John Falstaff walked off of Shakespeare’s stage and wrote his memoirs, they would read a lot like Memoirs of the Polish Baroque. Admittedly, Pasek lived 300 years later than England’s Henry IV, but the type is nearly immortal. Pan — the rough Polish equivalent of “Sir” and pronounced “pahn” — Jan Chryzostom Pasek is a low-ranking nobleman out for renown, love, adventure, riches, land and titles if he can get them, and glory for his commander, king and country. He fights the Swedes with at least as much enthusiasm as Capt. Jack Aubrey showed for “thumping the Frenchies.” The Swedes having been mostly driven off, he fights against invading Muscovites just vigorously. He has fighting spirit left over for fellow Poles who have risen up against their king. His pugnaciousness never left him. He was mostly settled by 1667, when he had some land in the Krakow region. What happened next?

At the first session [of the local assembly of the gentry], the Kraków gentry began to slight me, calling me a newcomer. But I, after dealing one a punch in the head, another a punch in the nose, another on the back, was left in peace and no longer called a newcomer. (p. 203)

Memoirs of the Polish Baroque

Pasek is not just — in his telling — brave on the field of battle, clever in his stratagems, fortunate when swords are swinging, he is also a formidable orator, one of the most prized skills in the nobles’ republic of Poland-Lithuania. In the early 1660s, parts of the Polish army and nobility rebelled against the king, who had not paid them for their services in various wars, and who was otherwise reneging on promises made. Rebellion was lawful within the Commonwealth, provided certain forms were observed, when the elected monarch was held to be violating the oaths made at the start of his reign. In this rebellion, Pasek held to the royal party, but was at one point captured by confederates. Pasek recounts dueling speeches at a meeting of Senators and other grandees in Grodno, where he, a mere country gentleman, held his own against magnates and bishops, winning his freedom and making points for the king’s side. He didn’t quite end the rebellion single-handedly, if only because the historic record would have shown otherwise and Pasek was averse to telling entire untruths in his Memoirs. But the account that he does provide leaves no doubt about his view of his own importance.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/09/16/memoirs-of-the-polish-baroque-by-jan-chryzostom-pasek/

Sep 15 2023

How To Make A Peanut Butter Sandwich In 17 Easy Steps by Bambi Edlund

Children are, at once, natural simplifiers and complete over-complicaters, so books like this charming title are totally up their alley, as our anthropomorphic cast uses the power of teamwork to make sure that they’re all fed and happy.

Bambi Edlund opens her picture book with a list of all the things you’ll need to make a peanut butter sandwich, including assorted animals, fruit that may or may not end up in the final product, and a bunch of seemingly unrelated items such as a fallen log and a set of dancing clogs. Seventeen might sound like a lot of steps, but that number provides a strong hook for young readers, who will want to know what could possibly be so complicated about something as simple as making a peanut butter sandwich?

Ms Edlund answers that question with aplomb, satisfying both animal lovers and fans of Rube Goldberg-like machinations. My middle child had great fun reading this book with me, with his favorite part being how the animals were all well-rewarded for their hard work in the end. My eldest child was inspired by our reading to start making his own list of how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, enlisting aforementioned middle child in pretend labors as they exercised both imagination and logic while playing nicely together.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/09/15/how-to-make-a-peanut-butter-sandwich-in-17-easy-steps-by-bambi-edlund/

Sep 13 2023

Photo Finished by Christin Brecher

I’ve been a big fan of Christin Brecher’s since her debut novel, Murder’s No Votive Confidence. The series that that book kicks off upends the (culinary) cozy formula in the best possible way, and is a must-read for me. I’m not actually sure if she’ll be writing any more of that series tho, as her attention now seems to be on her newer Snapshots Of NYC novels, of which Photo Finished is the first. Not that I begrudge her the change of direction, as this book is a hoot from start to finish!

PF introduces Liv Spyers, the college dropout and aspiring photographer who’s set up her small studio (and apartment) in the basement of her grandparents’ key shop, where she also helps out from time to time. Sending her resume out to various photography agencies has gotten her exactly zero callbacks, but no one ever succeeded in New York City by giving up at the first setback. When Regina Montague — renowned celebrity photographer and the owner of one of the highly successful studios that passed on Liv’s resume — comes into the key shop one day and mentions needing a photographer for an imminent gig, Liv immediately recommends herself. Regina is desperate enough to give her a shot, telling her when and where to show up to photograph a society debutante’s ball.

Liv is excited to snag the gig, not only for the pay but for the in that a successful night will give her with Regina’s agency. There’s only one small problem: her really good camera is still in the possession of a cute guy she had an unfortunately literal run-in with while on the subway earlier. Second best will have to do, but in an even weirder twist of fate, the cute guy himself is one of the (adult) guests at the ball.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/09/13/photo-finished-by-christin-brecher/

Sep 12 2023

The Green Witch’s Coloring Book by Arin Murphy-Hiscock & Sara Richards

subtitled From Enchanting Forest Scenes To Intricate Herb Gardens: Conjure The Colorful World Of Natural Magic.

Whether or not you’re already familiar with Arin Murphy-Hiscock’s Green Witch oeuvre, this is a delightful way to get to know it better. The experienced will love the way this coloring book enhances their existing practices, providing an activity that is both meditative and beautiful. The practical-minded like myself will also adore how functional this book is, as at the end of coloring each page, you’ll have made something beautiful enough to put up in your own home, perhaps as a reminder of your own Green Witch beliefs and ways. Several pages include prayers to go with the symbolism throughout, tho many pages are simply celebrations of the natural world.

This lack of heavy-handedness makes this book perfect for the novice, or even for those who aren’t particularly into this system of belief. There isn’t a ton of text, but the encouragement to open your heart to the magic of the natural world around you makes this an accessible way to learn a little more about what it means to be a Green Witch, even if that path is ultimately not for you.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/09/12/the-green-witchs-coloring-book-by-arin-murphy-hiscock-sara-richards/