Sep 09 2022

The Tryout: A Graphic Novel by Christina Soontornvat & Joanna Cacao

Author Christina Soontornvat wasn’t sure whether anyone would care about her experiences with middle school, but was eventually persuaded to write about one of the most cringe episodes of her own pre-teen career in this wryly moving graphic novel. I’m so glad she did.

It’s not easy being one of the few Thai people in Christina’s small Texas town, and especially not when you’re a huge sff nerd like she is. Her parents moved to Grangeview from Dallas in order to open an Asian restaurant in her mom’s hometown. The move was difficult for Christina until she met Megan, who quickly became her best friend. Now the inseparable pair are heading into middle school together, with all the changes and turmoil that entails.

The new kids are greeted on their first day by a squad of cheerleaders who are clearly the prettiest, most popular and most poised girls in school. When cheerleading tryouts are announced, Christina and Megan both decide to go for it. Christina fantasizes about being so popular that she can banish her bully into social limbo, and is thrilled when both she and Megan make it through the first round of cuts. Next, however, they must face the most terrifying prospect of all: auditioning in front of a whole-school assembly, before the entire student body votes for whom should be on the squad.

Which is absolutely nuts! Can you imagine having an athletic team chosen by popularity contest instead of by a coaching team with expertise on what their squad actually needs? My God, if some of those armchair blowhards who are my fellow Gooners were allowed to pick Arsenal teams, we’d be facing disaster so quickly if their Twitter ravings are anything to go by. Times have definitely changed for Grangeview since the events depicted here took place, but the experience was still extremely formative, if not outright traumatic, for Christina and her friends.

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Sep 08 2022

Hugo 2022 Chat

Doreen Sheridan: We should have a conversation about the Hugos and edit that and post on the site, because lol.

Hugo Award Logo

Doug Merrill: Sure! I was thinking about writing up my reactions, but joint reactions would be even better.
Looking at the longer list of statistics, I was so glad that Light from Uncommon Stars scraped in to the finalists. I would totally have missed it otherwise, and what a great book!
The two novels that just missed the cut were Perhaps the Stars, and The Witness for the Dead, which is the second book in the Goblin Emperor world.
I’d have traded those two for Project Hail Mary and A Desolation Called Peace. Of course those same stats showed that A Desolation Called Peace had the most nominations and led at every stage of voting. My being unable to finish the book puts me very much in Hugo’s minority.

Doreen: Very much agreed regarding Uncommon Stars. I haven’t heard of Perhaps the Stars, but I think you either reviewed The Witness for the Dead or it’s crossed my desk at some point.

Doug: I reviewed Witness. Perhaps the Stars is the fourth and last book in Ada Palmer‘s hugely ambitious Terra Ignota series (started with Too Like the Lightning). I gave the series my top vote in that category, where it came fourth.
What kinds of things struck you about this year’s Hugos?

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Sep 07 2022

Gustav & Henri Vol 1: Space Time Cake by Andy Matthews & Peader Thomas

Meet Gustav, a pig with a big imagination, and Henri Normal, his best friend who happens to be a dog (but like in a Goofy kind of way, as opposed to a Pluto.) The best friends enjoy spending time together, doing the usual things Australian kids do, including an old favorite of mine, playing badminton. When Gustav accidentally sends the shuttlecock flying into space one day, he and Henri not only have to build a rocket ship to retrieve it but also figure out a way to get it back from the person who’s claimed it as their own.

That’s the first story in this cute graphic novel. The second revolves around Gustav getting Henri into trouble by losing her library book. Cassandra the Librarian immediately revokes Henri’s library card, leading to our intrepid friends building a time machine to preempt such a terrible sentence. As with all time-travel tales, things do not go as planned.

In the final story here, Gustav initiates Henri into the mysteries of Pig Day, which is sort of the opposite of Christmas. But when the cake Gustav has so diligently baked goes missing, he’ll have to figure out which of their guests might have decided to renounce the spirit of Pig Day and claim the cake entirely for themself.

This is a sweetly silly graphic novel that hits that balancing point between a traditionally paneled comic book and the type of illustrated story recently popularized by middle grade books like Jeff Kenney’s Diary Of A Wimpy Kid series. My eldest adores that latter, and while the content of this book might skew towards a slightly younger demographic than his (my baby’s in middle school right now, can you believe it?), it’s a smart choice for the series authors, who know how to blend whimsical with earnest in their depiction of our title pair’s adventures. In addition to the three stories here are fun little activities that can be interpreted as either straightforward things to do or merely jokes to laugh at, such as Gustav’s take on Victory Nachos, with his marginalia not quite obscuring the actually delicious-sounding recipe below it.

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Sep 06 2022

Trick Or Treat, Alistair Gray by Lindy Ryan & Tímea Gazdag

Welp, Labor Day is over, so ofc it’s time to turn the consumerist attention to Halloween! (I’m mostly kidding, but also resigned to the world we live in.)

Halloween is such a weird holiday, IMO, less so in its origins than in the way it’s evolved over the years as an American (and associated) celebration. I’m one of those earnest weirdos whose favorite holiday is Thanksgiving, tho far, far less as a celebration of colonial survival at the expense of the indigenous than as a holiday focused on gratitude. While I enjoy the dressing up shenanigans of Halloween, I’ve found that as I get older, I 100% prefer the silly aspects of the holiday to the spooky, perhaps because real life is already scary enough without having to add supernatural fears into the mix.

However, if you have not yet been ground down by mundanity into eschewing the delight of a fearful thrill, then this book is definitely for you! Trick Or Treat, Alistair Gray is about a boy who loves Halloween but is taken aback by how cutesy it has become, with most of the other kids at school using the occasion as a time to dress up as princesses and cowboys instead of the monsters he longs to see. The school’s Halloween Ball is one of harvest treats and fall decor, greatly disappointing the mummy-rag-clad boy. Eschewing the safety of the school gym, he heads out into the night, looking for terror… and ultimately finding it.

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Sep 04 2022

Whispers Under Ground by Ben Aaronovitch

I’m only three books into the Rivers of London series, and already they feel like comfort reading. I can feel confident that with each new Peter Grant book I pick up, I will encounter characters I enjoy spending time with — the narrator first and foremost — that they will have adventures and scrapes, that Aaronovitch will reveal something new about London and its magical side, that the main characters will survive though not always unscathed, and that the mystery will be solved if not entirely resolved. I’ve previously mentioned three things that make Aaronovitch’s premise of magical police procedurals in contemporary (as of the time of writing) London work so well: humor both line-by-line and over longer stretches, unrestrained love for twenty-first century London, and a good balance of magic and mundane.

Whispers Under Ground by Ben Aaronovitch

Whispers Under Ground begins with Detective Constable Peter Grant corralled by the daughter of a friend of his mum’s to go and see a ghost. “Back in the summer I’d made the mistake of telling my mum what I did for a living. Not the police bit, which of course she already knew about … but the stuff about me working for a branch of the Met that dealt with the supernatural. My mum translated this as ‘witchfinder,’ which was good because my mum, like most West Africans, considered witchfinding a more respectable profession than policeman.” (p. 3) Thirteen-year-old Abigail has been down near some train tracks where, strictly speaking, she shouldn’t have been, and she saw the ghost of a young man who shouldn’t have been there either but was now in a sense there forever because a train struck him mid-graffiti. His ghost is still trying to finish spraying “Be excellent to each other.”

This encounter presages the main line of the book: an unknown person has been stabbed on the tracks just outside of the Baker Street tube station. He makes it as far as the platform before dying. The stabbing happened late at night. The man should not have been on those tracks, and he definitely should not have been able to get on those tracks without being spotted by Transportation for London’s extensive system of surveillance cameras. Which is the main reason DCI Seawoll — first seen in Rivers of London as a Northerner “with issues, [who]’d moved to London as a cheap alternative to psychotherapy” — calls in Grant in case there is any “weird bollocks” to deal with in the investigation.

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Sep 01 2022

How To Master Your SOCIAL POWER In Middle School: Kid Confident Book 1 by Bonnie Zucker & DeAndra Hodge

So my eldest child is now in middle school, and as someone who did not go through the American system for that span but who does have a husband who thinks it’s the most formative experience of a child’s life, it has been a bit nerve-wracking, to say the least, to watch my little fledgling fly. We try to rear him well at home but, let’s face it, navigating tricky middle school relationships, fueled by hormones and kids’ experimentation with social dynamics, is stuff we can’t guard against, and for the most part shouldn’t. As this book reminds us, learning how to handle complicated relationships as a teenager sets you up, hopefully successfully, for adulthood.

But who couldn’t use a guidebook in that endeavor? Enter the American Psychological Association and their newest series of books aimed at middle schoolers (and only coincidentally their parents.) The first in the series is the very relevant How To Master Your Social Power In Middle School. Written in a lively conversational style, with a hybrid pictorial format a la my eldest’s favorite Diary Of A Wimpy Kid series, this is an easy-to-read self-help book for kids struggling to understand why other kids are suddenly so mean to them in middle school and, most importantly, what to do about it.

The book is formatted clearly, from an explanation of what social power is, what good and bad examples of it are, then steps for dealing with the problem of being on the receiving end of social imbalance. It assumes, ofc, that the reader is not the one being the colossal jerkface, and outlines not only how to stand up for yourself but also how to rehearse for such (in a very cute chapter about role-play that I can totally get behind.) It encourages confidence and self-belief, and instils not only the seeds of assertiveness and proactivity but also the knowledge that you don’t have to be friends with kids who are terrible.

And I love all that. I escaped my adolescent years with my self-esteem intact, in large part because I believed in facing my fears and not giving in to self-doubt or peer pressure. I truly want that for my kids. As a way to stand up to kids who aren’t exactly bullies but are definitely on the meaner side of the relationship spectrum, this book is an invaluable resource.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/09/01/how-to-master-your-social-power-in-middle-school-kid-confident-book-1-by-bonnie-zucker-deandra-hodge/

Aug 31 2022

Something of a Milestone

This last day of August makes five full years that we at The Frumious Consortium have had at least 10 posts every month. For a site with two principal writers, that’s no small feat. We’ve only gotten there because of Doreen’s fabulous and prolific nature, and Frumious isn’t the only place she graces with her lively prose. I never peek at her drafts because I want to be surprised at what she has to say, and I am thrilled about the range of books and subjects she chooses to cover.

Alice looking behind the curtain

No big changes are planned to mark this milestone, but I thought it worth noting.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/08/31/something-of-a-milestone/

Aug 30 2022

Magical History Tour #10: The First Steps On The Moon by Fabrice Erre & Sylvain Savoia

I continue to be genuinely pleased and impressed by the consistently high quality of this children’s graphic novel series, that speaks just as meaningfully to any adult with an interest in popular (and sometimes not-so-popular) history as to any curious child.

The tenth installment of the Magical History Tour has Annie and Nico discussing spaceflight, with a focus on moon landings. It’s a very of-the-moment topic even despite the events discussed within the book’s pages having occurred over half a century ago: with the United States’ Artemis program currently in more or less full swing, interests are running high in space exploration once more. And while the recently delayed Artemis 1 was meant to be an uncrewed mission, our intrepid sibling narrators discuss the more interesting, at least to me, topic of all the crewed missions to have left earth for, orbited and landed on the moon.

The book begins with Nico on his trampoline, and Annie jokingly cautioning him not to launch himself to the moon. This leads to their discussion of the history of space travel, from the fanciful/prescient pop culture fantasies of the early 20th century to the actual rocket science developed by German engineers during World War II. The end of that conflict saw the United States and Russia scooping up German scientists as part of the nascent Cold War, with the space race beginning in earnest once the Soviets sent Sputnik I into orbit. After cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man to orbit the earth, US President John F Kennedy vowed to send and safely return a man to and from the moon by 1970. Mission accomplished, as this book details, tho President Kennedy was no longer alive when that historic moment finally came.

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Aug 27 2022

A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine

A Desolation Called Peace was always going to be a tough sell for me, and there’s little chance I would have started reading it if it hadn’t been a Hugo finalist. I could see the virtues of its predecessor, A Memory Called Empire, but from the way that book ended I had the sense — the sinking feeling, really — that the next book would be “plucky ambassador and her girlfriend team up to save civilization.”

A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine

At the end of A Memory Called Empire, the mighty Teixcalaan Empire was gearing up for a major war against an unknown, non-human starfaring civilization. The beginning of A Desolation Called Peace finds one protagonist of the first book, Mahit Dzmare, back from the imperial capital and sulking in various small spaces on Lsel Station, the outpost of some thirty thousand people that is her home. Three Seagrass, another protagonist, has risen quickly in the imperial government, but it is larger than Lsel, and wheels turn slowly. She is a Third Secretary, which turns out to be just right to be the person to receive a message from the commander of the war fleet on a weekend when most of the ministry is away. She is low enough in the hierarchy to be on duty, high enough to decide that she has all the qualities the commander has requested, to assign herself the task, and to be on her way almost before the rest of the bureaucracy notices.

Three Seagrass’ route to the war takes her through Lsel Station, where she is determined to pick up Mahit — who is not quite her girlfriend yet but who is quite clearly going to be — and take her along. Mahit has meanwhile managed to get herself into considerable trouble with the leadership of Lsel, who are, after all, her bosses as she is the station’s ambassador. Three Seagrass arrives just in the nick of time, and at least two members of Lsel’s governing council make improbable decisions to let Mahit leave with the Teixcalaanli liaison. Maybe it turns out that they had subtle reasons for doing so, maybe it’s just me thinking the choice unlikely, but I saw those choices as the characters living in the author’s favor. Martine can’t tell the story she wants to while keeping these characters apart, and so they must be together.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/08/27/a-desolation-called-peace-by-arkady-martine/

Aug 25 2022

Aven Green Music Machine by Dusti Bowling

with charming illustrations throughout by Gina Perry.

I picked up this book at ALAAC and 100% did not notice that the titular heroine does not have arms, despite the many illustrations inside and out pertaining to it, till she actually mentions it herself in the course of the first-person narrative. To a large extent, that’s one of the primary charms of this book, that Aven’s lack of arms is just a matter of fact, and that while her adventures are complicated by not having them, that latter trait isn’t what defines her as a person.

In this third installment of the chapter book series, Aven is excited for her class’ upcoming Talent Day, as she’s decided that she’s going to become a Professional Musician. Trouble is, she’s not sure exactly what instrument she’ll play, having never actually played one before. She’s pretty sure she’s going to be amazing at it when she finally does tho! Alas she soon discovers, as most of us inevitably must, that learning to play an instrument is nowhere near as easy as she thought it would be.

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