May 10 2022

Love, Comment, Subscribe (Ponto Beach Reunion #1) by Cathy Yardley

I wanted to make it a point to finally be able to cover Cathy Yardley’s adorable romance novel Love, Comment, Subscribe for Asian American Pacific Islander Month, so here we are!

The first book in the Ponto Beach Reunion series focuses on two former classmates, uptight Lily Wang and goofy Tobin Bui. Back in their Ponto Beach high school, they were both members of the self-described Nerd Herd, a sort of catch-all group of smart, driven and creative kids who happened to not be part of the popular crowd. Taiwanese American Lily badly wanted to get in with that latter social circle, but one humiliating lunchtime incident put paid to those ambitions. Ever since, she’s been striving to be the kind of girl who’d be accepted by the cool kids, eventually parlaying her perfectionism, business degree and love of beauty into a successful YouTube channel of mostly make-up tips, with the occasional fashion feature.

Half Vietnamese American, half white British Tobin, on the other hand, was the kind of goofball who was especially skilled at pushing Lily’s buttons. After high school, his interest in video games and sketch comedy led to his dropping out of college in order to focus full time on his growing YouTube channel. Featuring pranks, stunts and live game streams, he’s become phenomenally successful to everyone but his parents, who simply don’t understand the amount of effort and sheer work that goes into creating and maintaining his online business.

With their ten year high school reunion looming, both YouTubers find themselves at a critical career juncture. They each have millions of followers and views, but in the constantly churning world of online influencing, they need to figure out a way to take their brands to the next level or risk stagnation and worse. It’s Lily who originally has the idea for them to collaborate, and while Tobin gives her a hard time about it at first — mostly since they haven’t really spoken in almost ten years — he eventually comes around. The two need to work out how to integrate both their personas and their personalities, as well as their entirely different creative processes in order to build a successful collab. But could they be building more than just a professional partnership as they begin to discover entirely new and attractive sides to one another?

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/05/10/love-comment-subscribe-ponto-beach-reunion-1-by-cathy-yardley/

May 08 2022

Butler to the World by Oliver Bullough

Butler to the World begins with an American academic paying a visit to Oliver Bullough. Leading up to the publication of Moneyland, and even more since, Bullough has been writing about financial corruption, and particularly the ways that advanced, rule-of-law democracies have been helping corrupt rich people around the world keep and protect their ill-gotten gains. Andrew, as Bullough says the academic was named, “wanted to hear about Chinese-owned assets in London and what the British government was doing to ensure their owners had earned their wealth legally.” (p. 1)

Butler to the World by Oliver Bullough

What followed was initially an exercise in frustration that turned into understanding followed by an insight on Bullough’s part, one that sets the tone for the book.

Andrew had come well prepared for the meeting and had a checklist to work through … Which law enforcement agency was doing the most to tackle the threat of Chinese money laundering? Who was the best person to talk to at that agency? Which prosecutors had brought the best cases? … Which politicians were most alert to the question, and how did they organise themselves?
Because of the shared language, Americans and Brits often think their countries are more similar than they actually are, which is something I am as guilty of as anyone. When I do research in the United States, I am consistently amazed by the willingness of officials to sit down with me and talk through their work. I call them without an introduction, and yet time and again they trust me to keep specific details of our discussions off the record. Court documents are easy to obtain, and prosecutors willing to talk about them. Politicians meanwhile seem to have a genuine belief in the importance of communicating their work to a wider public, which means they’re happy to talk to writers like me. …
Andrew, however, was discovering that the pleasant surprise sadly does not work in the opposite direction. I think he had been hoping that I would share a few contacts … It’s possible that he was concerned I would refuse to open my address book to him, but it seemed not to have occurred to him that I would have no address book to open; that essentially the people he was looking for would not exist.
There was no concerted law enforcement effort against Chinese money laundering, I told him, so there was no investigator who could talk to him about it. There have been essentially no prosecutions so none for him to look into, and there is almost no research into where the money has been going, how it’s been getting there, or indeed how much of it there is.
He kept coming at the questions from different angles, almost as if he thought that he just needed to find the right password to unlock the door hiding Britain’s enforcement mechanism. Where was the equivalent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s International Corruption Squad … What about Homeland Security Investigations; did Britain have something like them? … Which parliamentary commissions were probing this? Surely, someone was? As he talked, I began to see the situation through his eyes, which gave me a perspective I’d never had before.
The problem was that he could keep trying different passwords until the rocks rotted away, but it wouldn’t help: there was no cave of treasures for him to open. … Andrew had come to London to discover how Britain was fighting illicit finance, but he was discovering that this was not happening at all. Quite the reverse, in fact. (pp. 1–3)

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/05/08/butler-to-the-world-by-oliver-bullough/

May 07 2022

Heisser Sommer by Uwe Timm

I came to Heisser Sommer prepared not to like it. A book by a male author in his forties, looking back on his glorious youth twenty years previous. That Timm chose not to use quotation marks for characters’ speech added to my annoyance. Worse, it’s set in the overexposed late 1960s, featuring a male protagonist who is not only a student at the time, but one who considers his inability to finish writing a particular paper a major crisis in his life. Still worse, the first scene is Ullrich breaking up with his girlfriend while they are still naked in bed. Spare me, I thought. And I did. The first time I tried the book, I put it down after the first thirty pages or so, and no regrets.

Heisser Sommer by Uwe Timm

But as I got closer to completing the Selected Munich set, I decided to give Heisser Sommer a second chance, and I’m glad that I did. It’s not that Ullrich becomes an especially likable figure over the course of the book; he remains a cad and a jerk a lot of the time, particularly to women. He can’t finish things, he lashes out, sometimes senselessly, often to his own detriment. He has a romantic notion of what revolution could mean, and he works to bring it about in Germany without thinking through what it could cost, and who would pay those costs. Ullrich, though, is more than just the sum of his flaws. He has a keen sense of the injustices around him, and he wants to correct those; he is willing to put his whole self on the line to make the society he lives in a better one. He sees the privilege he has as a university student — at the time, about five percent of Germans who finished school went to university afterwards — and he wants to earn that privilege, not just have it bestowed on him. He wants to be different from, and better than his father, who joined the Nazi party early and enthusiastically, and is struggling in postwar Germany as the owner of a slowly failing furniture business. I ended Heisser Sommer with considerable sympathy for Ullrich, and hope that he was finally on a path to making better choices, even as much remained unresolved.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/05/07/heisser-sommer-by-uwe-timm/

May 06 2022

Meddling Kids by Edgar Cantero

It would have worked, too!

As the back cover of Meddling Kids says, in 1977 the Blyton Summer Detective Club unmasked the Sleepy Lake monster, a low-life fortune hunter who put on a funny suit to scare people away while he searched the grounds of the Deboën mansion for the gold hoard that was rumored to be hidden there. The four kids (plus dog) set up a clever trap, caught the bad guy, unmasked him, and got their story in the local paper. Another triumph for the teens of the BSDC!

Meddling Kids

Except that wasn’t the whole story, was it? Why did the kids never return to Blyton Hills after that summer? What did they see, what did they hear, on that night on the island in the middle of Sleepy Lake? Thirteen years later, when Meddling Kids takes place, why is Kerri bouncing through a series of dead-end jobs far below her scientific ability? Why does she wake up screaming? Why has Andy (Andrea, but nobody calls her that on pain of, well, pain) been in an out of several jails? Why did the armed forces teach her special skills and then tell her to stay away? Why does Nate keep checking himself into insane asylums? Why did Peter—golden youth, movie star—die? And how does Nate keep conversing with him? At least Tim the dog, a descendant of the teen detectives’ original dog Sean, has his feet on the ground.

Andy gets the gang back together, by hook and not a little bit of crook, to go back and face what happened to them in the night that seems both a lifetime ago and only just the other day. Meddling Kids is darkly hilarious, in bits both big and small. Kerri and Andy arrive at Nate’s latest asylum. “They switched to the nonsmoking parlor, where they could smoke and be alone.” (p. 60) The two young women explain their plan for going back to Oregon, and Nate is full of enthusiasm until, nearing the stairwell, they encounter a nurse who reminds them that just because Nate committed himself doesn’t mean he can uncommit. The kinetic slapstick of how they spring Nate would do the show to which Meddling Kids is an homage proud. There’s a contraption, a surprise or two, and a key role for the dog. It’s no Shaggy-dog story, though, and some of the things that happen in the first scenes in the asylum prove crucial much, much later in the book. Cantero slides them past readers as natural parts of the adventure; when they turn up again, readers feel they’ve been there all along.

He gets the creepy bits, too: the increasing prevalence of NO VACANCY signs as they draw closer to the rural, isolated part of Oregon where Sleepy Lake lies dreaming, as if the land all around is conspiring to have them arrive late at night and with no more shelter than their old Chevy Vega can offer. He gets the nightmares that the characters, especially Kerri, are prone to, how real they seem, so that to a reader they seem like a scene in the novel until, sweet blessed relief, the waking world returns. It was just a dream, wasn’t it?

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/05/06/meddling-kids-by-edgar-cantero/

May 05 2022

Atlas of Extinct Animals by Radek Malý, illustrated by Jiří Grbavčic & Pavel Dvorský

God, what a depressing book. And I don’t say that as a bad thing necessarily, tho I certainly wouldn’t recommend this for anyone in need of an emotional pick-me-up. And while this is a decidedly sad volume — what self-respecting book covering the often needless extinction of entire species wouldn’t be? — it also carries a throughline of hope, as deftly written by poet Radek Malý.

Covering the life and death of forty-one different species, this is a well-researched volume of popular science that ranges the world and showcases both well and lesser-known exterminations. It’s also remarkably even-handed, even when it’s remarkably clear that the number one cause of species extinction is the, often malicious, encroachment of humans. It’s both saddening and infuriating to read how certain species, such as the Steller’s Sea Cow and the Great Auk, died from humanity’s sheer bloodthirstiness, even after other humans had worked so valiantly to stop the unnecessary slaughters.

Of course, not every extinction was necessarily our fault, or even wholly unwelcome. Am I going to lose any sleep over the loss of a species of swarming locust? Incredibly doubtful. But the display of biodiversity here, with interesting anecdotes and historical information, is both breath-taking and sobering, showing the negative and positive impacts of human encroachment, civilization and science over the past several millennia in a way that encourages readers to grieve less and do more. Science, in fact, is where the book places a lot of its hopes, briefly detailing the ongoing efforts to revive several of these species ahead of a possible reintroduction to the wild.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/05/05/atlas-of-extinct-animals-by-radek-maly-illustrated-by-jiri-grbavcic-pavel-dvorsky/

May 04 2022

Hugo Awards 2022: Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form Nominees

To be perfectly honest, I’m a little peeved that The Suicide Squad wasn’t nominated this year. It was by far the best superhero movie of 2021, even before launching the excellent Peacemaker series. Given what won last year’s award tho, I suppose I shouldn’t be so surprised that my tastes differ so greatly from the average voter’s. Ah, well, one votes in hope of earning one’s favorites recognition, and while I was overall bummed by the safe choices in the nominations this year, there’s still much to like (I hope: I have yet to read much of the literary slate but am planning on doing that as soon as I can!)

So let’s talk about the movies/series that were nominated this year. I actually quite disliked The Green Knight (David Lowery) which was heavy on vibe and mood but light on story or sense. It’s a visually arresting movie featuring a talented, diverse cast who were given a shockingly flimsy script to work with. I was actually disappointed when I left the theater, having expected much more and better.

Encanto (Byron Howard, Jared Bush, Charise Castro Smith) was also a movie I had much higher expectations of. It felt like a thinly veiled allegory for family wealth, and while the main character’s sisters were compelling, I didn’t really care about anyone else in that family. I mean, it was fine. My kids like to sing the very catchy “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” and the versions it’s since spawned on the Internet. But the weirdly paternalistic capitalist vibe of the movie — plus the silly romance at the end — made me rate this one quite poorly of the nominees.

The two Marvel entries on this list are tied for middle-of-the-road status in my book, with Shang-Chi And The Legend Of The Ten Rings (Destin Daniel Cretton, David Callaham, Andrew Lanham) narrowly edging out WandaVision (Matt Shakman, Jac Schaeffer, Peter Cameron, Mackenzie Dohr, Laura Donney, Bobak Esfarjani, Megan McDonnell, Cameron Squires, Gretchen Enders, Chuck Hayward.) The first episode of that latter is one of the best things to ever grace television, but the last few episodes were a hot and awful mess. Shang-Chi, on the other hand, was solidly entertaining throughout, if you occasionally had to turn your brain off at times to properly enjoy the story. The thing with archery being “easy” still makes me grit my teeth, but was 100% less offensive than Wanda getting away with her crimes just because she had a sad.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/05/04/hugo-awards-2022-best-dramatic-presentation-long-form-nominees/

May 03 2022

Rogue Protocol by Martha Wells

By reading the Murderbot series all out of order (2-5-6-1-3, with 4 lined up to read soon) I’ve not experienced its coming to terms with its freedom or its engagement with other non-humans as a story of continuous progress. On the other hand, knowing a bit more about where Murderbot is headed — including its later preference for SecUnit instead of Murderbot as a moniker — I look at its earlier interactions with a view toward where it is going.

Rogue Protocol by Martha Wells

The main story of Rogue Protocol concerns SecUnit accompanying a human group to an abandoned space station that had been part of a terraforming effort. The team is meant to assess the station before a new company takes over from SecUnit’s corporate nemesis, GrayCris. SecUnit suspects that GrayCris had been engaging in illegal activities before the station was abandoned, and that there are still some traces of records in the station’s remaining low-level robotic denizens. Initially, the humans are unaware that SecUnit is on board the ship taking them to the station, and then on the station itself. The party, however, is accompanied by what SecUnit disdainfully thinks of as a “pet robot,” and its presence compels SecUnit to partially reveal itself. The other robot is known as Mikki, and its interactions with humans are far from what SecUnit has been used to up to this point in its existence. “Or Mikki was a bot who had never been abused or lied to or treated with anything but indulgent kindness. It really thought its humans were its friends, because that’s how they treated it.” (p. 49)

What follows is something of a meditation on trust, as the situation is not entirely what it seems, and neither are all of the humans. Things get worse when the station turns out to have Combat Units on board, which were definitely not expected. SecUnit has not been fully honest with the humans, and yet it needs their cooperation just as they need its abilities. The relationship between Mikki and the humans appears to be something like genuine friendship, an approach that flummoxes SecUnit with its warmth and apparent affection. SecUnit’s deception calls for Mikki to be economical with the truth to the humans, which is probably a new behavior for both Mikki and its humans. As the story develops, some of them see through it but do not directly expose what the robots have been up to.

The action is fast and furious, with reversals, unexpected dangers, and connections to the overarching Murderbot story, along with the droll humor that is a trademark of the series. The third novella in the series is not the best place to start. Even though the story would be a good adventure if it was the first one someone read, the larger questions and concerns are clearer if it’s not a reader’s starting point.

+++

Doreen’s review is here. In contrast to Doreen, I bought a print version of Rogue Protocol precisely because I like it as a pretty object. I’m even considering getting paper copies of All Systems Red and Artificial Condition, which I have in electronic form, because apparently I’m the kind of collector that she mentioned. (But the books are very satisfying to see and hold!)

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/05/03/rogue-protocol-by-martha-wells/

May 02 2022

The Mythics Vol 4: Global Chaos by Patrick Sobral, Patricia Lyfoung, Philippe Ogaki, Jenny, Dara, Alice Picard & Magali Paillat

One problem I’ve had with The Mythics series so far is that knowing mythology and religion and history as well as I do, I’m sometimes made distinctly uncomfortable by the way the authors play fast and loose with established identities. I’m sure readers with a more superficial reading of the old tales won’t even notice, but that’s the kind of thing that makes me uneasy despite vastly enjoying the rest of the book, from story to art entire.

The first chapter of this volume closes the first story arc of the on-going series. Our six adolescent heroes — Japanese Yuko, Indian Parvati, Egyptian Amir, German Abigail, Mexican Miguel and Greek Neo — have been tricked by Evil into unleashing Chaos into the world, at the expense of the great Mother Goddess Gaia. With the aid of their ancestor gods, they must figure out how to trap Chaos once more, as the fate of the planet hangs in the balance. The denouement is both clever and Avengers-like, and opens the way to further complications in the world-changing aftermath.

The other two chapters start the next story arc, riffing off of the Seven Deadly (Christian) Sins to present first the effects of the embodiment of Lust, then Envy on an unsuspecting world. The Lust chapter is both PG-rated and hilarious, as the effects of the succubus Abrahel cause Neo and Yuko to each express their overwhelming desire for Abi. Not wanting to involve the three youngest members of their team in this mess, Abi has to figure out by herself how to get her two afflicted teammates to help her defeat the demon before the latter can sink the world into a frenzy of lust-driven murder.

The chapter on Envy is the one that made me go hrm, as the incarnation of Envy here is called Ishtar. That representation choice aside, this was a very cute adventure for the other three members of The Mythics, as they travel to Africa for the official opening of a nature preserve, only to land smack in the middle of palace intrigue. No one is safe from the temptations of Envy, except perhaps the intrepid Miss Taylor, Amir’s nanny, bodyguard and personal badass.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/05/02/the-mythics-vol-4-global-chaos-by-patrick-sobral-patricia-lyfoung-philippe-ogaki-jenny-dara-alice-picard-magali-paillat/

Apr 28 2022

Armadillo Antics by Bill Martin Jr., Michael Sampson & Nathalie Beauvois

My children all went through a stage of obsession with Bill Martin Jr’s Chicka Chicka Boom Boom. I didn’t really understand it from reading the words flat on the page, but when they started singing it to me (particularly the Crystal Taliefero version,) I finally got it.

A similar thing happened with Armadillo Antics. Tho Bill Martin Jr passed in 2004, Michael Sampson builds on his legacy with this short book, incorporating the kind of rhyme structure used in Mr Martin’s other famous work, Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?. Again as with that latter, I didn’t really understand the rhyming scheme/point (as a fast reader, even as a child, I tend to go for content over sound) and was ready to write this book off as another book I was sure would be popular though I didn’t see the appeal myself… until I recruited my 8 year-olds to come read this for me.

And wow, did those kids love this book! The escalating beat of the “Armadillo, Armadillo, Armadillo” refrain in particular was a favorite, with the kids providing their own chant-like emphasis when reading aloud to me. I almost feel as if they learned by osmosis here, as the rest of the informative text was something they read over mostly in order to be able to get to the next Armadillo x3 instance. Tho in fairness, their ears definitely perked up at the mention of twins. After all, who doesn’t like seeing themselves represented in books, even in animal form?

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/04/28/armadillo-antics-by-bill-martin-jr-michael-sampson-nathalie-beauvois/

Apr 27 2022

Magical History Tour Vol 8: Vikings by Fabrice Erre & Sylvain Savoia

Another enchantingly educational installment in the terrific Magical History Tour series! I wonder if I can eventually get all these in a boxed set for my kids: that would be super rad.

Volume 8 focuses on the legendary Vikings, taking them out of the realm of myth and placing them squarely in the known history of Europe and North America. Fabrice Erre details their reign of terror over the lives but more often the imaginations of 8th-11th century Europeans, detailing the unique circumstances that led to the seafaring primacy of these warriors and merchants who spread out from their Scandinavian homeland to pillage and conquer the more fertile lands to their south and west. He examines how their geography, social structure and religion made it so that Vikings, often known as Normans or in the east as Rus, felt compelled to travel far and wide, and how changing norms and cunning local politics got them to assimilate into the lands they once viewed as foreign sources of plunder.

All this, of course, is told in Annie’s trademark even-handed tone as she tells her younger brother Nico about the Vikings and their exploits. The children are at the beach with their parents, who aren’t entirely thrilled by the fierce spirit her stories are instilling in her rather more excitable sibling. In addition to being entirely charming, the framing device of the children makes the entire exercise that much more accessible for young readers, especially those who might chafe at reading something improving.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/04/27/magical-history-tour-vol-8-vikings-by-fabrice-erre-sylvain-savoia/