Nov 26 2021

The Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo

Though it contains tales of considerable violence, The Empress of Salt and Fortune remains in my mind as an almost restful story. It’s set at a secluded compound near Lake Scarlet, a nearly perfectly round lake formed by a falling star, and named for a glow that sometimes appears at sunset, starting faintly and then “sweeping across the lake like the sparks of New Year fireworks. It was brilliant, to hard to look at so very closely, and it flooded the water, enough so that [Cleric Chih] could make out individual trees on the beach, the black silhouette of the night birds on the water, and the seamed face of the woman standing next to [Chih], creased in pleasure.” (Ch. 1) So it is with the story, starting with a low glow and then burning so brightly that all of the Anh empire stands out in relief before fading again.

Chih comes from the abbey in Singing Hills and belongs to an order that records history, not only of the powerful. The old woman from Scarlet Lake “sounded a little like the former Divine, who had always encouraged their acolytes to speak to the florists and the bakers as much as to the warlords and magistrates. Accuracy above all things. You will never remember the great if you do not remember the small.” (Ch. 1) Chih is accompanied by Almost Brilliant, a magical bird that has perfect memory and can talk. It’s a neixin, with the ability to pass all its memories to its descendants, and similarly to call up the memories of its ancestors. That the old woman recognizes the bird and knows its functions is just the first sign that she is much more than she seems. (Also, the bird has Opinions.)

How much more begins to become apparent when she refers to Scarlet Lake as Thriving Fortune.

“… I have never heard the name Thriving Fortune before, grandmother.”
“You wouldn’t. It is what the female attendants of Empress In-yo called it when they first came here from the capital. It was a joke, you see. They were all of the court, and it was a bitter thing indeed for them to be sent into the wilderness with a barbarian empress.”
Chih sat very still, and next to them, Almost Brilliant cocked her head to one side.
“It sounds like you knew of them, grandmother.”
Rabbit [the old woman’s nickname] snorted.
“Of course I did. I came all this way with them, and it was I who told them to hire my father to come up every week with supplies from the main road. They never knew to tip him, or perhaps they thought their cosmopolitan beauty was tip enough. Pah!”

Chih and Almost Brilliant abide a while in Scarlet Lake, and they listen to Rabbit’s stories. Each chapter begins with descriptions of small objects that Chih finds around the compound, and they lead to more tales from Rabbit as she gradually reveals how and why she went from the provinces to the imperial court — and back again. Along the way, Nghi Vo gradually reveals the empire to readers, seen long after the events Rabbit discusses, and from a great distance. The war mages held the empire in eternal summer and the prosperity that brought — until it ended. The late empress whom Rabbit served, and whose ghost-led funeral cortege Chih and Almost Brilliant saw leaving Scarlet Lake as they were coming in, had the right to display the mammoth of the north and the lion of the south. What did that mean?

I found Anh a fascinating world, with Vo delivering just the right balance of personality and archetypical stories. Rise and fall, personal and imperial. But the Empress of Salt and Fortune brings her individuality to bear on her circumstances, in ways that surprised Rabbit at the time and will probably take readers unaware too. Her tale twists and turns, and refracts through Rabbit’s telling as well as Rabbit’s own story.

Cleric Chih returns in When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain, and in the forthcoming Into the Riverlands. I’m looking forward to reading both of them.

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Doreen reviewed The Empress of Salt and Fortune back in March when it was new, and flagged it as a potential Hugo finalist. Well spotted!

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/11/26/the-empress-of-salt-and-fortune-by-nghi-vo/

Nov 25 2021

Come Tumbling Down by Seanan McGuire

Many things have transpired at Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children since I read the debut novella, Every Heart a Doorway, but I did not feel lost at all. My thanks to Seanan McGuire for making subsequent installments of her series inviting even to people who do not hang on its every word. The Home is a haven for children who have had doors open for them into other worlds, worlds in which they were heroes, worlds which subsequently sent them back to this mundane order where they are hopelessly out of place and yearn for a way back. The Home gives some of them hope, all of them understanding, and many of them peers among fellow returnees.

Come Tumbling Down by Seanan McGuire

Come Tumbling Down opens in the basement room that formerly belonged to Jack (short for Jacqueline), a student who, along with her twin sister Jill (short for Jillian), found her way back to the other world. Christopher, whose room it is now, was down there dreading the time when he will be too old for the school and longing for his Skeleton Girl and the Country of Bones, when the overhead light “flickered again before spitting a great, uneven bolt of lightning that struck the concrete floor with a crack so loud it was like the whole world was being broken.” (Ch. 1) Not the whole world but the gap between two worlds. Jack is back from the Moors, and in dire condition.

Well, not exactly Jack. Jack in Jill’s body, though the only student who recognizes that is Sumi, hero of Beneath the Sugar Sky. Sumi went to a Nonsense world called Confection and, as another character observes, it left her a little bit scrambled. “‘Dying scrambled me more,’ said Sumi matter-of-factly” (Ch. 2) which sums her up nicely.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/11/25/come-tumbling-down-by-seanan-mcguire/

Nov 24 2021

The Last Jews Of Penang by Zayn Gregory & Arif Rafhan

Hey, everyone, my very talented friend Arif Rafhan has illustrated a(nother) terrific book!

The Last Jews Of Penang is a slight volume suitable for all ages, that highlights a little known corner of Malaysian and Jewish history. A small but thriving Jewish settlement existed on the island of Penang for well over a century, building first a synagogue then, in the early 1800s, a graveyard several blocks away. The settlement’s decline began with World War II, as many of the Jewish inhabitants fled from the Japanese allies of the virulently anti-Semitic Nazi regime. After the war was over, many evacuees chose to stay with the larger diaspora community in Singapore or moved to Israel. By 1976, Penang’s synagogue could no longer support itself due to lack of congregation, so had to close its doors. The graveyard, however, still stands, maintained by Indian hereditary caretakers. With it stands the community’s legacy, a firm if obscure reminder that Malaya was once a safe haven for the Jewish, no matter the inflammatory rhetoric that made it into the Malaysian political mainstream towards the end of the 20th century.

I’m a big booster of Arif Rafhan’s work, and not just because of my continuing gratitude for his unwavering support for my musical eccentricities back in college. His illustrations are just so good, from the calligraphic endpapers to the dreamy watercolors of the interiors, easily evoking mood with color and light. Whether depicting an idyll of childhood happiness, the incipient horror of WWII, or the portraits of real community figures, he does an excellent job of bringing life to Zayn Gregory’s words, which for the most part are succinct and easily readable.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/11/24/the-last-jews-of-penang-by-zayn-gregory-arif-rafhan/

Nov 23 2021

The Bird: The Great Age Of Avian Illustration by Philip Kennedy

So for real, I spent every few pages of this gorgeous, luxe volume either exclaiming or sighing, “So beautiful!”

I hardly expected anything less from a book billing (ha) itself as a retrospective of the golden age of avian illustration, but I honestly did not expect a volume so hefty and extraordinary, and for only $60! Granted, the Great Age in question was primarily the 19th century, so having all the many illustrations here be in the public domain certainly helps keep costs low. The paper and ink quality throughout however are a testament to the care put into this retrospective, as well as to how far we’ve come that the printing industry can manage to make such works affordable and accessible to many now. This is, of course, in sharp contrast to the early days of bird books, when works by John James Audobon and John Gould were available only to the significantly monied, not out of any unnecessary scarcity, but because those labors of love were in themselves expensive to create.

But oh, how gorgeous and worthwhile, and how faithfully rendered here! Philip Kennedy selects an illuminating breadth of illustrations first published between the 18th and early 20th centuries to showcase the talents and efforts of some of the pioneers of popular biology, in the form of bird artists. The Audobons may not be life-sized as the artist originally intended, but they’re beautifully, faithfully represented in all their breath-taking glory. Page after page of this book shows off the very best of that great age of avian illustration, with not only the Eurocentric works of the most well-known artists (including Edward Lear!) but also selections from Japanese, Mughal and Ottoman art.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/11/23/the-bird-the-great-age-of-avian-illustration-by-philip-kennedy/

Nov 22 2021

Gigantic by Ashley Stokes

The blurb makes you think this is going to be a comedy, and perhaps for some it is. But it reminded me very much of my first pro theater production, a play with what I thought was a bleak if occasionally funny script, set in a series of airport waiting areas. We performed it to laughs every night but always in the back of my mind lingered the knowledge of the desperation that underpinned the words, and the despair: a bit of a Malaysian Alan Ayckbourn if you will.

Gigantic recaptures that vibe exactly for me, as it follows the hapless Kevin Stubbs, an investigator for the Gigantopithecus Intelligence Team and a man determined to finally make a confirmed sighting of the missing link hominid that he’s convinced lurks in the Sutton woods. Despite his own sheltered, fatherless upbringing, he’s tried so hard to instill his passion for cryptid tracking in his own young son, Kyrylo. After a series of mishaps, he’s sure that getting proof will not only vindicate his passion, but also bring him fame, perhaps fortune, and definitely reconciliation with his now-estranged family. He doesn’t mean to be a weird, neglectful father and husband. But achieving his goal of proving the existence of a South England Bigfoot will show to everyone that he’s not a laughingstock, that he’s merely misunderstood, and that all his strange behavior has had a very scientifically important point.

In this, he’s more or less aided by the other members of GIT, particularly Derek Funnel, who’s just as much a believer as he is, if not more. Kev is a bit annoyed still that he was passed over for the role of Lead Investigator by the retiring Eddie “Gorgo” Gartree, who handed the mantle instead to Maxine Cash, the skeptical science teacher with her own motives for joining the group. Despite still being married to Bohu, the mother of his child, Kev can’t help but be attracted to Max, which will certainly complicate things as they follow up on the strange recording of what seems to be a tall, hairy creature with glowing red eyes, captured on the outskirts of a children’s party before fleeing into the night.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/11/22/gigantic-by-ashley-stokes/

Nov 21 2021

Finna by Nino Cipri

Who hasn’t wondered whether all those twists on the path through Ikea might not lead somewhere else entirely? In Nino Cipri’s Finna, the Ikea stand-in LitenVärld (it means “little world” in Swedish) has a recurring problem with wormholes opening within its stores and leading to LitenVärld analogues in parallel universes. Not that management tells anyone, of course. In fact, there used to be in-store experts for dealing with the wormhole problem but budget cuts and restructurings made that expertise a thing of the past.

Finna by Nino Cipri

Finna opens with Ava trudging in to work at LitenVärld one miserable Tuesday in February. She’d rearranged her schedule to avoid encountering her co-worker ex, Jules, but finds herself coming in to substitute for a different co-worker on a day when Jules also works. That sets up what was, for me, the less interesting thread of Finna: young people having to deal with an ex like another human being. The better part of the story gets going when a “young woman with olive skin and thick, black-brown hair approached the [customer service] desk” where Ava is working and says says, “I’m sorry to bother you, but I think I lost my grandmother.”

She continues, “‘She was right behind me in the showrooms? I turned around to get her opinion, and she was gone. I’ve been looking for her for ten minutes and …’ She trailed off, shrugging helplessly.” It’s the kind of thing that happens all the time, but in this case time drags on, no grandmother. PA announcement, no grandmother. And on a February weekday, there aren’t exactly crowds for her to have gotten lost among. The shift manager eventually sends Ava out to look for the lost grandmother, whereupon she bumps into Jules who explains the horrors that led them to volunteering to search.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/11/21/finna-by-nino-cipri/

Nov 20 2021

The Lost Pianos of Siberia by Sophy Roberts

Fittingly, if annoyingly, I have mislaid my copy of The Lost Pianos of Siberia, so this will have to be from memory, just like many of the stories that Sophy Roberts collects over the course of the book. The conceit of the story is that Roberts was spending most of a summer with a German friend in Mongolia — as one apparently does — and she heard a young Mongolian woman playing the piano with extraordinary grace and beauty. Roberts quickly realized that the skill and talent of Odgerel Sampilnorov outclassed the limited instruments available to her in rural Mongolia, or indeed all of the country. Roberts promises to find and bring to Sampilnorov an instrument worthy of her abilities.

Lost Pianos of Siberia by Sophy Roberts

That promise turned into a quest, that quest took Roberts back and forth across Siberia, and the journeys became a book (also documented in part on a web site). In the book, Roberts braids three strands: first, the history of pianos in Russia, and to a lesser extent the history of pianos in general; second, Russian history from Catherine the Great onward, with a particular emphasis on Siberia; and finally, Roberts’ own travels to far-flung parts of a far-reaching place. Similarly, she divides the book chronologically into three parts: “Pianomania,” 1762–1917; “Broken Chords,” 1917–1991; and “Goodness Knows Where,” 1992–present. The first date is the beginning of the reign of Catherine the Great, a time when piano technology was advancing and the instrument assuming its modern form even as Russia was importing European expertise, very much including instrument makers for its court and upper nobility.

Roberts describes how in Russia pianos became symbols of culture and refinement, how developments in the international market let to the establishment is a significant domestic piano manufacturing industry, as well as how teachers, composers and impresarios found a larger market in Russia for their services than practically anywhere else in Europe. During the Imperial period, these linked developments led to a great dispersal of fine pianos across the empire, not least in Siberia. The first great fortunes made in Siberia came from fur, and as trading posts grew to towns and cities, nobility and bourgeoisie alike showed their cultivation by bringing pianos across the great distances from Europe. Subsequent engines of prosperity such as the railroad or natural resources produced wealthy households whose members craved the culture that piano playing represented. Less happily, nobles forced into political exile in Siberia brought their households, including pianos, with them. Roberts notes particularly the many Decembrists – idealists who revolted against the Tsar in 1825 — who brought culture, science and learning with them to Siberia. European Russia’s loss was Siberia’s gain, and that very much included pianos. She also relates the history of Polish rebels, many of them educated, sent to Siberia, and the instruments they either brought or found in that distant land.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/11/20/the-lost-pianos-of-siberia-by-sophy-roberts/

Nov 19 2021

Riot Baby by Tochi Onyebuchi

I don’t remember the last time a novella, oh heck, any book, has been so strong and thoughtful before totally collapsing for me in the last two pages.

“Riot Baby” is not a directive, as I’d mistakenly believed: it’s a nickname. Kev is born during the L.A. riots that blaze in the aftermath of the acquittal of the police officers who savagely beat Rodney King. Afterwards, Kev, his mother Lainey and his older sister Ella move from California to Harlem in search of a better life, only to find gang violence and police brutality just as much a factor on the East Coast as it was back home. Ella also has to grapple with the burgeoning of strange powers that she can’t quite control. Back in California, her main special ability was precognition, with the too-often distressing ability to see into the blighted futures of the people around her. In New York, however, her abilities bloom and spiral till she’s forced to exile herself from everyone she loves out of fear of hurting them.

Bereft of Ella’s company and protection, Kev falls in with the wrong crowd, giving up on love and a settled future, and winding up in jail instead. Having gained some mastery of her powers, Ella comes to visit him, in body and spirit, as much as she can. But a tension grows between them: since she’s so powerful, Kev wonders, why can’t she bust him out of prison? But Kev’s own powers are growing as well, as the siblings are forced to come to terms with their bond and what it means to survive in a future just a smidge more dystopian than our own.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/11/19/riot-baby-by-tochi-onyebuchi/

Nov 18 2021

Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark

I don’t think I’ve yet met a premise of P. Djèlí Clark’s that I haven’t loved!

Ring Shout by P. Djeli ClarkRing Shout posits the idea that the Ku Klux Klan are made up of both your regular hate-filled Klansmen and demonic Ku Klux entities from another realm masquerading as human. Not everyone can see these Ku Klux in their demonic form, especially since most of them start out as your average Klansman before being turned. Maryse Boudreaux, however, can, and has turned her talent to hunting and destroying as many of these demons as possible, with the help of munitions expert Chef and sharpshooter Sadie. All three live under the protection of Nana Jean, an infamous Gullah bootlegger who works her own formidable magic in Macon, Georgia.

No one’s exactly sure how the Ku Klux infiltrated humanity, but Maryse and her crew think it has something to do with the ultra-racist movie Birth Of A Nation. When a special screening is announced atop nearby Stone Mountain, and a new butcher comes to town offering free meat to upstanding white people, Maryse knows that some new horror is afoot. What she’s less sure of, tho, is the ability of Nana Jean’s gang to handle this emerging threat, even with the help of Maryse’s enchanted blade. Will Maryse’s desire to protect her people lead her to making alliances she may soon regret?

Horror-wise, this is one of the creepiest novellas I’ve read in a long time. I still get the shivers thinking about some of the perfectly grotesque scenes, many to do with the terrifying Butcher Clyde. I also loved how effortlessly Mr Clark wove real history and established mythos with his own brand new take on demon hunting, with an impressive time travel fillip that fit perfectly into the narrative.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/11/18/ring-shout-by-p-djeli-clark-2/

Nov 17 2021

Finna (LitenVerse #1) by Nino Cipri

Like, I knew this was a portal fantasy of two exes navigating the multiverse that opens up in an IKEA-style store, but the blurb and the cover especially did not prepare me for the excellent hijinks that ensued! I’m also a bit ashamed to admit that I really want to go visit IKEA again after reading this. Their food is just so good, y’all!

Ava works a soul-killing retail job in a big box store like IKEA, only worse, called LitenVärld. She’s finessed her schedule such that she can avoid working the same shifts as her ex, Jules, but a last-minute call-out means she has to go in to cover a co-worker’s shift and, unfortunately, run into Jules in the process. As if that isn’t bad enough, an elderly customer goes missing while browsing the store, and she and Jules are forced to team up to find her. Trouble is, the customer seems to have gone through a wormhole into another dimension, and while Jules seems happy enough to follow, Ava has to be voluntold by a manager who seems weirdly unsurprised by the entire deal. Said manager shows them a brief instructional video before handing them a FINNA machine to help track and retrieve the lost customer, then off they go!

As Ava and Jules pass through several dimensions that all vaguely mimic the LitenVärld they’re most familiar with — some in more horrifying ways than others — they’re forced to examine their relationship, its demise and how they and their own personality flaws contributed to that end. IKEA on a good day is a stress test for many couples: imagine going through that when you’ve just broken up, and with life-and-death stakes and creatures out of nightmare! Add to that the corporate/capitalist hellscape that is our heroes’ real lives, and you have a terrific horror-filled satire that still touches thoughtfully and sensitively on determination and the optimism of possibility.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/11/17/finna-litenverse-1-by-nino-cipri/