Sep 25 2022

She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan

Considering a book of scholarly articles about the history Chinese international relations, I wrote that it was “chock full of implied stories” and looked forward to the day that I could read some of them. Shelley Parker-Chan chose a later inflection point from Chinese history to tell the story of She Who Became the Sun, but it’s a similar notion, and part of a welcome trend in fantasy writing: opening the genre to historical backgrounds that aren’t just warmed-over England. Parker-Chan sets her novel at the turn of Chinese dynasties, when the last heirs of Chinggis Khan faced growing rebellions in the south that eventually toppled their rule.

She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan

Dynasties, marching armies, the fate of millions: all of that is far away from the book’s beginning. It starts with a poor family, Zhu, and their second daughter who only vaguely knows her age in a time of famine. Parker-Chan leaves the girl nameless as she describes the privations that have reduced the Zhu family from 13 people to three: father, daughter and favored son Zhu Chongba. He is the eighth boy in his generation of male cousins, considered lucky even though all his brothers have perished. For his twelfth birthday the father takes him to a fortuneteller, who trembles at the greatness that he sees in Chongba. Emboldened, the girl asks for a reading of her fate, too. “Then, as if from a distance, she heard the fortuneteller say, ‘Nothing.'” (p. 20)

But when their village is raided — soldiers? bandits? is there a difference in a time of civil war and famine? — and father Zhu is killed, it is not Zhu Chongba who seizes greatness. He soon lies down and dies. His sister is incredulous. How could he, to whom greatness had been promised, choose nothingness? A thought soon appears: “If he took my fate and died … then perhaps I can take his, and live. … She took off her skirt and put on Chongba’s knee-length robe and trousers; untied her hair buns so her hair fell loose like a boy’s, and finally took the amulet from his throat and fastened it around her own.” (p. 26) Having taken all that, she takes his name too, and takes herself off to the Buddhist monastery where their father had once promised to send Chongba to be a monk when he was old enough.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/09/25/she-who-became-the-sun-by-shelley-parker-chan/

Sep 24 2022

Exit Strategy by Martha Wells

At the end of Rogue Protocol, the SecUnit otherwise known as Murderbot had incontrovertible evidence that its corporate nemesis GrayCris had been engaging in illegal activities involving alien technology. It had little faith that exposure of the activities had caused the corporation serious harm, but GrayCris’ reactions suggested that the company might take a different view.

Exit Strategy by Martha Wells

The corporation was holding Dr Mensah, the human who had given SecUnit its freedom, thus causing all sorts of feelings that SecUnit didn’t want to think about at all, and would likely soon do more than just keeping her as a hostage. Mensah and her team theoretically had the resources of a bond company as well as the diplomatic heft of Preservation Station at their call to free her. In practice, GrayCris was outbidding Mensah’s claim on the bond company and obstructing her team’s efforts to hold them to their contract. Diplomacy’s stern words did little to deter a corporation whose back was up against the wall, and who cared little for legalities in the first place. Enter SecUnit, hoping to secure a survivable exit for Mensah, her team, and itself.

Reading Exit Strategy well out of order in the series (it’s the fourth novella, and I’ve read them 2-5-6-1-3-4) did not diminish my enjoyment at all. I probably would have enjoyed Exit Strategy even more if I had experienced it as the culmination of four novellas instead of knowing that future SecUnit manages to go from frying pan to fire both on an outward mission and closer to home on Preservation Station. Even knowing that SecUnit eventually succeeds in its mission — not least because this isn’t the kind of series that kills major sympathetic characters, not yet anyway — the action is clever and tense.

In addition to the well-constructed rescue story, Wells also shows SecUnit coming to terms with itself. It has had some changes made to make it appear more human, and it doesn’t like that much at all. On the other hand, if nearly every scan and a large number of basic humans could identify it as a Security Unit that had gone rogue, then its life would probably be considerably shortened. It wants to be itself, but it is willing to trade some of that in exchange for not being reduced to spare parts. SecUnit’s bargain for living in a society is starker than most people’s, and that would probably give it anxiety if there weren’t so many other more immediate reasons to be anxious.

The deadpan humor and dry observations make this a story that’s funny page by page; the humanity of someone learning to be a person, a good person, give it grace.

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Sep 23 2022

The Very Genius Notebooks #1: The Chronicles Of Deltovia by Olivia Jaimes

I’m genuinely starting to believe that some of the best under-the-radar writing out there nowadays is coming from middle grade authors.

Not that Olivia Jaimes is primarily that (or even her real name.) Having gained acclaim for her reboot of the long-running Nancy comic strip, she’s now published her first middle-grade novel under this name, using the hybrid illustrated format popularized by Jeff Kinney with his Diary Of A Wimpy Kid series. And at first this book reads just like those more famous novels, only with a trio of female friends as the centerpiece. But as the story progresses and we discover the truly heavy — but not too, too heavy — stuff going on behind the scenes, it’s clear that this isn’t just a genderbent version of an already successful franchise but something truly special in its own right.

The Chronicles Of Deltovia starts with Mischa, June and Ollie — three best friends who attend Lakeview Middle School — deciding to write a fantasy novel together. They pass a notebook around that they take turns filling out and illustrating, adding comments and notes to each other as they go. At first, it’s very much like every pre-teen’s collaborative effort at writing a fantasy novel (or at least a lot like my own): uneven but with glimmers of greatness. Far more interesting than the fantasy narrative is what we learn of the girls as we go. Mischa is dramatic and dreamy; June is focused, scholarly and often anxious, while Ollie is a kind-hearted jock.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/09/23/the-very-genius-notebooks-1-the-chronicles-of-deltovia-by-olivia-jaimes/

Sep 21 2022

Cryptid Club by Sarah Andersen

with the loveliest colors by Celi Godfried.

This utterly charming collection of cartoon vignettes revolves around a Cryptid Club populated by the mysterious monsters that have haunted folklore since time immemorial. Well, mostly since time immemorial, as there are two much more modern but still quite famous cryptids featured here as well, in the form of Eric Knudsen’s Slender Man (created in 2009!) and Trevor Henderson’s Siren Head (2018). Also, did you know that Cthulhu’s first printed appearance was in 1928, in a H. P. Lovecraft short story? I feel like I did, but also that Cthulhu and the rest of that mythos were far, far older!

Regardless of their origin point in human history, each of these monsters and more are presented as having very relatable needs and desires, particularly when it comes to modern living. After all, who doesn’t want friends and understanding, and a flattering photograph taken every once in a while? Told in a loosely linear fashion, we follow along as the cryptids establish relationships, tell jokes and try to connect with the weird humans who keep wandering through their lives.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/09/21/cryptid-club-by-sarah-andersen/

Sep 20 2022

The Real Women Of Greek Myths by Natalie Haynes & Natalie Foss

As a game designer and enthusiast myself, it’s perhaps a natural evolution of my career in book criticism to consider and cover all the many things a bookstore can provide, games included. So when I was offered the chance to review The Real Women Of Greek Myths: A 1,000 Piece Jigsaw Puzzle Based on Feminist Tales, I absolutely leapt at the opportunity.

With countless others around the globe, my interest in jigsaw puzzles was reignited by the pandemic that kept so many of us indoors for the better part of two years. My best friend even got me a mat kit with little snap-together trays one Christmas, not only to sort out pieces while working on the puzzle, but also to keep the whole caboodle clear from my little children’s naughty fingers. My puzzling tastes are fairly orthodox: I prefer strong, clear images with lots of color, and appreciate both a bit of narrative and a keen wit. I do like the occasional mystery puzzle where I go in image-blind in order to find the solution to the accompanying short story, but most of all I’m a huge fan of the Magic Puzzle Co’s innovative work and gold standard craftsmanship.

So how does this jigsaw puzzle hold up in comparison? By now, regular readers will know that I’ve been obsessed with Greek mythology since I was a child. Despite this, I’d never done a Greek mythology-themed jigsaw puzzle before TRWoGM. This was a surprisingly great way to combine the two interests, as constructing the images of the women — who are delightfully shown in a full range of skin colors and body types — really helps reinforce each of their stories. I don’t think I’ve ever thought “poor Europa!” as many times as when I was putting the pieces of her together, as she crouches in the forefront of the picture, holding a toy-sized bull.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/09/20/the-real-women-of-greek-myths-by-natalie-haynes-natalie-foss/

Sep 16 2022

Nona the Ninth (The Locked Tomb #3) by Tamsyn Muir

Ugggggh, I love Nona so much.

Not Nona the book — and we’ll come to that later — but Nona the character, who is about the sweetest gorram teenager you’ve ever met in your life. Well, technically a teenager: her body is about nineteen years old but she’s only really been alive? resurrected? reborn? for almost six months now. So, ofc, she wants a birthday party, to include her friends at school, several good dogs and the few members of the Blood Of Eden guerilla group whom she’s familiar with.

This last group, ofc, is strictly vetoed by her guardian Camilla Hect (yes, that Camilla, yesssssss!) who is taking care of her with the assistance of a grumpy older person named Pyrrha. Our little trio live in The Building, a somewhat scary edifice that houses all sorts of unsavory characters. Nona, no longer being a complete infant, is allowed to go to school, where she’s a Teacher’s Aide who hangs out with a literal gang of teenagers. These teens are very anti-zombie, which is basically what everyone on their planet calls the necromancers of the Nine Houses and their minions and soldiers. Thus sweet Nona is also anti-z-word, too, even tho she has a sneaking suspicion that her little family might be more involved with necromancy than she wants to think about. But when an honest-to-God Lyctor comes calling, demanding that this planet give up its House renegades in exchange for resettlement somewhere far away from the planet-killing threat looming in the sky, matters come to a head and Nona must finally confront who and what she really is.

Whereas the first book in the Locked Tomb series was Battle Royale meets And Then There Were None, and the second a murderous boarding school mystery in space, this third book is about a true innocent growing up in a dystopia and finding herself far more important than she’d ever imagined. It’s a bit Chosen One-ish, but Nona is just so darn likeable that I eagerly read all the chapters of her adolescent adventures with her friends as war and disaster threw long shadows over them. Interspersed with these are chapters from the viewpoint of God a.k.a John, who reveals (mostly) what happened to get him to his exalted position. John is a dick but he is also hilarious, so I spent a lot of time laughing at his jokes and feeling a little bad about it later. His essentially dirtbag POV is a nice contrast to Nona’s earnest desire for all her friends to love one another, as she loves them, making the first 75% of the book a quick, compelling read.

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Sep 11 2022

Medieval Ethiopian Kingship, Craft, and Diplomacy with Latin Europe by Verena Krebs

The name Solomon brings the word “wisdom” almost immediately to mind. Belatedly, it makes me think of the Temple. Now that I have read Medieval Ethiopian Kingship, Craft, and Diplomacy with Latin Europe by Verena Krebs, I will also remember the Solomonic dynasty of Ethiopia. That dynasty took power in the late 1200s and ruled, with some interruptions, until 1974. There is a pretender who is not completely excluded from Ethiopian politics, so it’s possible that the current rulership will someday be regarded as an interruption in rule by the sons of Solomon.

Medieval Ethiopian Kingship

Krebs concerns herself with a period that runs from the very end of the 1300s through the first third of the 1500s. During this time, the kingdom in the Ethiopian highlands was mostly internally stable, barring the occasional inheritance crisis and regency. A succession of of Solomonic kings — Krebs uses the local title nǝguś — sent emissaries to fellow Christian realms in the Latin West: Venice, Naples, Aragon, the Papal court, and others. The dates and personnel of the missions have long been known to scholarship, and Krebs draws on primary and secondary sources in an astonishing range of languages. In history, though, interpretation is crucial, and here Krebs upends previous Eurocentric specialist views on what the Ethiopian ambassadors were seeking in their relations with Latin courts, and thus on medieval relations between Europe and Africa more generally. Scholarship in the twentieth century tended to see medieval Ethiopian contacts with Europe as seeking technology in general and military technology in particular, and possible military alliances against regional rivals. Krebs disagrees.

Reading the diplomatic sources within the framework of local late medieval Ethiopian history, this book proposes that Ethiopian rulers sent out their missions to acquire rare religious treasures and foreign manpower expedient to their political agenda of building and endowing monumental churches and monasteries in the Ethiopian highlands. Acquiring artisans and ecclesiastical wares from faraway places for religious centres intimately tied to Solomonic dominion would have necessarily increased their prestige within the Christian Horn of Africa, following a mechanism well-attested for numerous societies in the pre-modern world. Such requests from a foreign sovereign sphere were rarely caused by a shortage of indigenous labor or materials—particularly not within fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Ethiopia. Here, they appear instead to be an intentional emulation of the actions ascribed to the biblical king Solomon, propagated by the Solomonic Ethiopian rulers as the dynasty’s genealogical ancestor … This very same king Solomon, too, is repeatedly narrated as sending envoys to another sovereign ruler to obtain both precious wares and a master craftsman to construct the first temple in Jerusalem in the Bible. The sending of missions to Latin Christian potentates appears to have been one of the strategies through which the [Ethiopian kings] locally asserted their claim of rightful Solomonic descendence–and actively if somewhat incidentally initiated a particularly noteworthy case of African-European contacts in the late medieval period. (p. 6)

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/09/11/medieval-ethiopian-kingship-craft-and-diplomacy-with-latin-europe-by-verena-krebs/

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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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/09/09/the-tryout-a-graphic-novel-by-christina-soontornvat-joanna-cacao/

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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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/09/08/hugo-2022-chat/

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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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/09/07/gustav-henri-vol-1-space-time-cake-by-andy-matthews-peader-thomas/