Sep 27 2023

Potatoes For Pirate Pearl by Jennifer Concepcion & Chloe Burgett

The best time to enjoy tales of pirates is when you’re a kid, when it’s all about the romance of the high seas, with no thought as to the terror, rapine and death left in the wake of these often exceedingly violent criminals. I mean, who doesn’t dream of sailing away from their troubles, swaggering through life free as a bird? I absolutely understand the appeal, even as I find adults who’re seriously into this lawless pirate stuff to be a little, if you’ll excuse the pun, unmoored from reality.

But kids should absolutely dream of exploring the world care-free, as our protagonist Pirate Pearl does in the company of her “rainbow chicken” Petunia. Pearl is actually in the middle of a voyage when she’s beset by that greatest enemy of all travelers: hunger. Hardtack just won’t cut it any more, so she and Petunia drop anchor and head ashore on an epic quest for food. Just as she’s about to expire from hunger, she’s rescued by the kindly Farmer Fay, who not only resuscitates her with some potato soup but also introduces her to the miracle that is my favorite vegetable. Best of all, Fay shows Pearl how to grow potatoes herself, whether on a farm like Fay’s or aboard a pirate ship like Pearl’s.

This seems like a simple enough story but Jennifer Concepcion and Chloe Burgett have teamed up to create something entirely magical, with help from their publisher’s sponsoring body, the American Farm Bureau Foundation For Agriculture. Pearl is an utterly charming main character who is fully committed to the (pirate) bit in the way of all imaginative children. Fay is her good-natured mentor who is happy to play along but also knows when to guide Pearl’s piratical ways back to the strait (lol, I’m sorry, I love pirate jokes and puns) and narrow.

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Sep 26 2023

Art Brut, Vol 1: The Winking Woman by W. Maxwell Prince & Martín Morazzo

with colors by Mat Lopes, backup colors by Chris O’Halloran, and letters & design by Good Old Neon.

This is easily one of the most intelligently artistic graphic novels I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading. You don’t have to be an art history major to enjoy this book but a passing familiarity with the most famous artworks of our time does help, especially if you want to spot all the art references and in-jokes our creators make along the way. And oof, some of the design choices on the interstitials are just luscious. I love how this goes from fine art to modern comic to pop art parody and back, all in a matter of (absolutely gorgeous) pages.

And that’s just the visuals! Once you get into this surreal but intensely thought-provoking, if not outright moving, story, it’s impossible to put down. The title Art Brut isn’t just a reference to the notion of outsider art, as opposed to the high-minded academic institution of fine art. It’s also the name of the Dreampainter, a consultant used by the Bureau of Artistic Integrity to help solve their most bizarre cases.

BAI’s new Director Margot Breslin certainly knows it’s time to call in the big guns when the Mona Lisa suddenly appears to have one eye closed. No one has come in to the Louvre to paint over Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece: one moment she was as usual, the next she was winking. If that was the only issue, Breslin would probably leave Art to keep painting in his padded cell. But a rash of gruesome deaths has broken out worldwide that all seem to be linked to the changed Mona Lisa. The strange and possibly demented Art may very well be the only person capable of preventing more carnage. With the help of his artist’s mannequin, imaginatively named Manny, Art agrees to leave the safety of his sanatorium to help Breslin figure out what’s going on.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/09/26/art-brut-vol-1-the-winking-woman-by-w-maxwell-prince-martin-morazzo/

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/