Apr 25 2023

Outpost Zero by Sean Kelley McKeever & Alexandre Tefenkgi

Collecting the entire fourteen issue run of the sci-fi comic book title.

So this book has an interesting perspective on the living-in-space genre. Outpost Zero is all that remains of a generation ship that left Earth centuries ago. The survivors have adopted something of a small town mentality, focusing on keeping their outpost alive and otherwise exhibiting a marked disinterest in exploring the icy planet on which they crash landed.

Ofc, not everyone is so inwardly focused. Alea is the brave, almost foolhardy daughter of members of the Discovery team, the dwindling group responsible for venturing outside the dome. As she and her friends approach Singularity — i.e. the day they choose their grown-up career paths — they contemplate their futures. Alea wants to follow in her parents’ footsteps. Steven is happy to join his own dad in Engineering, while Lyss doesn’t particularly care where she ends up, despite her father’s ambitions. Mitchell wants to be a prizefighter, the dome’s main entertainment. No one’s heard from Mitchell’s twin Maddie in some time. Steven’s friend Sam, who for some reason rouses Mitchell’s ire, is already interning for Security, under the watchful eye of his foster mother, who’s the station’s Chief Of Security.

But then Steven breaches the airlock in an apparent suicide. The rest of the kids are devastated. Alea refuses to believe that Steven would kill himself without any sign or warning, and begins to investigate. What she discovers could turn their entire community upside down, and either crush their spirits for good or give them a new hope altogether.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/04/25/outpost-zero-by-sean-kelley-mckeever-alexandre-tefenkgi/

Apr 23 2023

Silver in the Wood by Emily Tesh

An unconsidered moment of kindness sets Silver in the Wood in motion. Tobias Finch had been in his cottage during an autumn downpour when he spied “a young man in a well-fitted grey coat stumbling along the track with wet leaves blowing into his face and his hat a crumpled ruin in his hands.” (p. 7) Tobias hollered for him to come in. Within the first three pages, Emily Tesh establishes differences between Tobias and his visitor, Henry Silver. Tobias’ cottage is neat and he keeps a cat, but the cottage’s one good window has cloudy panes, and when Henry arrives Tobias had been preparing to sharpen his own knives. Henry’s nice coat, by contrast, “was a damn good coat … the kind so perfectly tailored it required a servant to pour you into it and peel you out again.” (p. 8) The cat likes the visitor, and the two men seem inclined to pass the time in companionable silence, though they have only just met.

Silver in the Wood by Emily Tesh

When they do start to talk, it’s the friendly sort of banter typically born of long acquaintance, though Tesh will later show that the conversation was hardly typical for either of them.

“They say a madman lives in Greenhollow Wood,” said Silver, looking over at him.
“Who’s they?” said Tobias.
“The people I spoke to in Hallerton village. They say there’s a wild man out here—a priest of the old gods, or a desperate criminal, or just an ordinary lunatic. He eats nothing but meat, raw, and it has made him grow to a giant’s stature; or so I was given to understand at the Fox and Feathers. They informed me that I would know him by his height and his hair.”
“His hair, hmm,” said Tobias.
“Waist-length and unwashed,” said Silver, looking at Tobias.
“Now that’s a slander,” said Tobias. “It’s not past my elbows, and I wash all over every week.”
“I’m glad to hear it, Mr Finch,” said Silver.
“The rest’s all true,” said Tobias.
“Old gods and banditry and lunacy?”
“And the one where I eat people,” said Tobias, unsmiling.
Silver laughed abruptly, a splendid peal of sound. “Maidens, they told me. Yellow-haired for preference.”
“Nothing for you to worry about, then,” said Tobias. (pp. 9–10)

Tobias reveals that he has figured out that Silver must be the new owner of Greenhallow Hall, making him Tobias’ landlord. When Silver asks how he can make it up to Tobias, he answers “Cut my rent.” They make a few more joking remarks about the wild man of the wood before Silver returns to the road to the Hall, bidding a friendly farewell.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/04/23/silver-in-the-wood-by-emily-tesh/

Apr 20 2023

Otis & Peanut by Naseem Hrab & Kelly Collier

This heartwarming children’s book is being marketed as a graphic novel but feels very much like a picture book to me. That said, both formats are good? Especially when the story and art are both so strong.

Our title characters are best friends. Otis is a long-haired guinea pig while Peanut is a naked mole rat. Over the course of the three stories collected here, the besties face a number of surprisingly complex challenges together, and deal with them sensitively and with a load of heart. Best of all, the situations they face are not uncommon for any young reader, and help set a template for how to grapple with each circumstance.

In the first and perhaps silliest of the stories, Otis needs a haircut but is afraid it will hurt. Peanut would like a haircut but doesn’t have any hair, so the two decide that a wardrobe update might help Peanut with a well-needed change.

In the second story, The Swing, our friends talk about how much Otis misses Pearl. The circumstances of why Pearl is gone are never discussed, but the friends talk about how hard it is to miss someone while also having happy memories of them.

The last story, The House, is a thoughtful look at what makes a house a home. And then be still my heart: a recipe for baked potatoes! (pictures after the jump)

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/04/20/otis-peanut-by-naseem-hrab-kelly-collier/

Apr 19 2023

Magical History Tour Vol. 12: The Samurai by Fabrice Erre & Sylvain Savoia

As someone who has spent a patently absurd amount of time playing Legend Of The Five Rings, a role-playing game heavily inspired by Far Eastern cultures, it’s always fascinating to me to see how lacking my knowledge of Japan actually is. Books like this one gently correct my misperceptions, in the most interesting way possible.

Regular readers will know I’m a big fan of the Magical History Tour series which, while written for kids, is full of thought-provoking information for curious minds of all ages. This twelfth installment focuses specifically on Japan’s samurai: who they were; how they came about, came to power and declined, and the hold they continue to have on the world’s imagination. It’s a wholly absorbing book that presents its information clearly and without prejudice, and is honestly an essential primer for anyone who doesn’t know much — or who wants to know more — about this topic.

The seriousness of the subject matter is greatly leavened by the presence of Annie and Nico, our young present-day narrators. The story actually begins when Nico continually loses his cool while they’re playing a game of badminton. Annie suggests that staying calm will help him focus, much like the samurai believed. Nico, ofc, has no idea who they are, launching the two on their magical tour through history. Our narrative duo are perpetually charming, even if I, like Annie, feel that Nico maybe shouldn’t be trusted with sharp blades quite yet.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/04/19/magical-history-tour-vol-12-the-samurai-by-fabrice-erre-sylvain-savoia/

Apr 18 2023

The Night Tent by Landis Blair

My middle child loved this book so much that he took off with it after we finished reading it and I still don’t know where it is, lol.

Landis Blair’s first picture book is the story of Watson, whose fears of the creatures in his closet and under his bed prevent him from feeling sleepy. Watson soon discovers a light under his covers, and crawls beneath to find a tent spangled with stars from the night sky. This sets him on a voyage through a fantastic nocturnal landscape where he learns that maybe strange creatures aren’t so scary, and that having lots of adventures makes a body very sleepy indeed.

This is a perfect book for helping kids get ready for sleep! The little insets with “Watson wasn’t sleepy yet so” (and I have to paraphrase because my kid ran off with the book) feature pictures of Watson getting progressively sleepier, and made me want to yawn as my body involuntarily relaxed with Watson’s. It’s a deeply clever psychological technique that’s perfect for soothing children (and their tired adults) to sleep.

The art is delightfully tenebrous, with clean lines and a style hearkening back to classic author-illustrators such as Maurice Sendak and Tomie dePaola. Mr Blair’s palette is cooler than those authors’, with blues predominant and pale yellows and white used as highlights, in keeping with the subject matter.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/04/18/the-night-tent-by-landis-blair/

Apr 15 2023

Sation Eternity by Mur Lafferty

What’s it like to be the protagonist of a mystery series? Everywhere you go, people die. Vacation? Murder. Big social occasion? More murder. Village fête? Very murdery. Spotting the clues and solving the crime when local police are stumped does not exactly win friends either. Mallory Viridian hates it. She’s had years of practice, and a testy relationship with police across North Carolina up to and including the State Bureau of Investigation. Normal people never adjust to murder. It’s debatable whether Mallory falls into the category of “normal,” given the number of premeditated deaths she had been in close proximity to, but her reaction is normal. She tried therapy — during a session the therapist’s wife murdered his secretary in the mistaken belief that they were having an affair — she tried religion — several, in fact.

Station Eternity by Mur Lafferty

“Miracles happen daily if we just open ourselves to it,” one priest had said while she was in confession. He hadn’t wanted to call it a miracle when, while hearing Mallory’s confession, a parishioner had been murdered in the church’s parking lot. The church had not admitted she was right; they instead accused her of orchestrating the crime. This was her eighth murder and she should have known better. (p. 11)

When Station Eternity opens in 2044, she has more than ten murders behind her. She’s adapted. “She had kept her distance from her neighbors and made friends only with the night volunteers at the local animal shelter. She shopped online or late at night in twenty-four-hour grocery stores. She tried to avoid groups of people at all costs.” (p. 13) She has a reasonably successful career as an author of mystery novels, mysteries based on the real crimes she has solved. The approach keeps her alive, and it does a good job keeping people around her alive too. But it’s “so, so goddamn lonely.” (p. 13) Which is probably why she lets a neighbor persuade her to go to a birthday party being held on a nearby military base.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/04/15/sation-eternity-by-mur-lafferty/

Apr 11 2023

The Little Wooden Robot And The Log Princess by Tom Gauld

I didn’t even know Tom Gauld had written a children’s book! This is his first of hopefully many, especially given the delightful allusions peppered throughout this volume to the title characters’ adventures while on their epic journey.

Once upon a time, a king and queen lived happily but for the fact that they had no children. My eldest child, who was reading this with me, asked, “So why didn’t they just do a funny?” (that being what his circle of friends apparently calls sex nowadays. Twelve year olds, y’all.) I had to explain to him that not all sex leads to pregnancies or subsequent childbirth, tho many of them do, so point one to the book for helping introduce that concept.

Anyway, the king turns to an inventor and the queen to a witch, and next thing you know, they have a wooden robot and a log princess for children. And everyone is very happy and loving and kind. But the princess has a secret: every time she falls asleep, she turns into a log who can only be awoken with a certain phrase. Usually, it’s the robot’s job to wake his sister so they can spend the day playing. Alas, he gets distracted by the circus coming to town one morning. When he remembers to go wake the princess, he finds that an oblivious maid has tossed her out the window. The robot goes chasing after, but will he able to recover his sister and bring her home?

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/04/11/the-little-wooden-robot-and-the-log-princess-by-tom-gauld/

Apr 09 2023

Human Chain by Seamus Heaney

So here I am at the end of Seamus Heaney’s major collections. I came via the sideways path, the one that starts with his Nobel lecture, which is brilliant, and has repaid many re-readings. It took me through Finders Keepers a collection of his prose, and then through his Beowulf. I no longer remember just why I picked up Stepping Stones, a collection of interviews of Heaney conducted over several years by Dennis O’Driscoll, a fellow Irish poet. After reading that collection, listening to the two of them talk about life and poetry for several hundred pages, I decided it was time to go and find the poems. And so I have. Following the Frumious advice, I began at the beginning and now I have come, more or less, to the end. Human Chain is the last collection of poems published in his lifetime. I may go back and pick up some of his translations — Sweeney Astray piqued my interest, and somewhere I think I still have my copy of his translation of Jan Kochanowski’s Laments — or maybe the collections that he edited together with Ted Hughes. But for major collections, it’s re-reading from now on. The poems will have to come back to me as if new.

Human Chain by Seamus Heaney

Human Chain seems to me to have more longish poems, or at least longish for Heaney, than most of his other collections. “Eelworks” offers six sections, short though each might be, while two poems later “A Herbal” has fifteen unnumbered parts across nine pages. “Route 110” makes its journey across twelve twelve-line sections, and there are nine “Hermit Songs” dedicated to Helen Vendler, a colleague of Heaney’s during his Harvard years. He is giving himself room, loosening up the concision that marks so much of his other work. The poems in this collection also seemed to me to have more than Heaney’s usual amount of non-English words and phrases dropped into the ordinary run of the lines, as if, as he neared the line between life and death, the borders among this world’s languages became more porous, his thoughts ran as naturally through one as through another and he wanted his readers to experience this unity as he did.

His eye for longer views by no means keeps him from appreciating, and sharing, more fleeting moments as in the poem that opens the collection:
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Apr 08 2023

Chernobyl by Serhii Plokhy

Thirty-six seconds. That’s how long the test that sealed Chernobyl’s fate lasted. The test itself was not unreasonable, and could only be performed as a reactor — one of four in operation at the power station in 1986 — was being shut down. It was designed to provide data to understand how the reactor and the systems surrounding it performed under certain unusual circumstances, data that were intended to make long-term operation safer and more reliable. Almost all of the decisions leading up to those thirty-six seconds were reasonable, and even the few that were questionable were well within the norms of Soviet industry, which rewarded getting things done regardless of circumstances, which often set unreasonable goals, and which generally operated among shortages and cutting corners. Each of those choices, some made as far back as when the reactors were designed, had the effect of narrowing the margin for error.

Chernobyl by Serhii Plokhy

Some uranium atoms naturally shed neutrons. Most of the time, the result of this process is unremarkable. Bring enough uranium close enough, though, and the neutrons will cause other uranium atoms to split and shed additional neutrons. If more neutrons are produced by splitting uranium than are absorbed by nearby materials, the process continues as a chain reaction that releases vast amounts of energy and produces a variety of other materials, some of them highly radioactive. Starting a nuclear chain reaction requires nothing more than the material and proximity. Controlling a chain reaction requires quite a bit more: some kind of medium to make sure that the reaction continues at a steady rate, neither stopping nor accelerating out of control, plus cooling to ensure that the heat is dispersed, and the systems necessary to guide and monitor all of these processes. Making use of a chain reaction requires a further layer: a means to convert the heat that fission releases into electricity. The heat converts water near the reaction into steam, which is then piped to spin a turbine, which spins and generates electricity. The steam then condenses back into liquid water. After sufficient cooling, it is piped back through the system, and the cycle continues.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/04/08/chernobyl-by-serhii-plokhy/

Apr 06 2023

Codex Black Vol 1: A Fire Among Clouds by Camilo Moncada Lozano

with colors by Angel/Michi DeSantiago.

This is a really fun graphic novel that I almost bounced off of in the first few pages because it’s so darn dark. And I don’t mean in mood: I mean that it’s so visually murky that my brain was refusing to engage with the images on the page. I’d had that problem before when my husband gave me a physical copy of Kill Six Billion Demons for Christmas: it looked way better on my PC than on the page. So I went to check out Codex Black’s origins on Tapas and was pretty surprised by the choice to drag down the beautiful clean lines and graphic pops of color of the original webcomic with the saturated blacks of the physical book’s first few pages.

Fortunately, the book soon switches back to the webcomic’s aesthetics, tho I have to concede that the digital art actually does look much more impressive via digital medium. But I, of all, people, cannot complain: physical comics are way easier for me to read in general. It’s just easy to tell when something was originally created for a different platform, as it doesn’t have quite the same flow as a story written for print.

But enough of my quibbling! You should read this book because it’s a really fun story that showcases an under-explored genre in English-speaking literature. In Codex Black, two unlikely young heroes with supernatural powers get together to unravel a personal mystery that promises to have consequences for the entirety of 15th century Mesoamerica.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/04/06/codex-black-vol-1-a-fire-among-clouds-by-camilo-moncada-lozano/