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.

Continue reading

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.

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/09/16/nona-the-ninth-the-locked-tomb-3-by-tamsyn-muir/

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)

Continue reading

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.

Continue reading

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?

Continue reading

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.

Continue reading

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

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.

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/09/06/trick-or-treat-alistair-gray-by-lindy-ryan-timea-gazdag/

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.

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/09/04/whispers-under-ground-by-ben-aaronovitch/

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.

Continue reading

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/