Aug 13 2021

Fugitive Telemetry by Martha Wells

Humans didn’t generally turn up dead on Preservation Station. It was a low-violence society where most people’s needs were well met. As the SecUnit mostly formerly known as Murderbot puts it, “This junction, and Preservation Station in general, were also weird places for humans to get killed; the threat assessment for both transients and station residents was low anyway, and mostly involved accidents and cases of intoxication-related stupidity/aggression in the port area. In this specific junction, the threat assessment for accidental death was even lower, close to null.” (p. 2)

Fugitive Telemetry by Martha Wells

And yet, incontrovertibly, there is a dead human in that very junction. One who has been dead for approximately four hours when the body is found. Worse, the body does not carry any of the items (“subcutaneous marker or chip or anything else with ID”) that the Station Security or SecUnit could use to identify the body. Interestingly, the entire first chapter of Fugitive Telemetry passes without a physical description of the body: apparent gender, size, coloration and so forth all remain hidden from the reader. Skipping those details is one way that Wells uses SecUnit’s first-person narration and perspective to show how it perceives and understands the universe. It switches immediately from recognizing the fact of a corpse to analyzing the situation without any of the intervening horror or sympathy that a human investigator would feel. “I’ve seen a lot of dead humans (I mean, a lot) so I did an initial scan and compared the results to data sets…” (p. 1)

Preservation’s leadership reacts by, among other things, closing the station to all incoming and outgoing traffic. Fugitive Telemetry is a mystery novella, and the mounting costs of isolating the station put pressure on everyone involved to solve the crime as quickly as possible. The closure also means that suspects should be findable, if SecUnit and the humans of Station Security can figure out who they are looking for.

It’s more than just detection. There are people, and worse, companies, out in the Corporation Rim who want to kill SecUnit and some key humans on Preservation. Is this murder part of a larger attack by GrayCris? Is the security that SecUnit works to provide good enough? “But the fact was, looking for anomalous activity is how you detect security breaches. A murder in a very non-murdery station like Preservation was definitely anomalous.” (p. 33) Are more murders likely?

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Aug 12 2021

Like Other Girls by Britta Lundin

A coming-of-age novel with a queer country girl narrator playing sports and learning to interrogate her internalized misogyny while embracing who she is despite the opposition of certain members of her small town, including her nearest and dearest? I was wholly on-board even before I started reading Britta Lundin’s terrific, lived-in prose, and now I want everyone to read this wonderful book!

Mara Deeble has always been one of the boys. Her older brother Noah and her best friend Quinn are both big deals on the Elkhorn football team, but she’s always loved her place on the basketball team… until Coach Joyce benches her for punching a teammate. Now Coach refuses to reinstate her unless she can prove that she can go a full season on another team without getting into any fights. For girls at Elkhorn, the only other team sport is the (highly competitive) volleyball team. While it’s a good fit in terms of athletics, Mara doesn’t want to be one of those pretty volleyball girls who discusses make-up and clothes before games. So, egged on by Quinn, she decides to try out for football instead.

The Elkhorn football team is admittedly pretty dire, and while Coach Willis is initially flummoxed by the idea of a girl joining the team, he accedes to treating Mara like one of the boys when it becomes obvious that she has real talent. But when a group of other girls decides they want to play football too, and cite Mara as their inspiration, her already precarious social standing with the team goes downhill fast, especially when it becomes apparent that the other girls don’t actually know how to play. Mara certainly doesn’t want to be lumped in with them, and especially not with the deeply annoying Carly Nakata, who was the reason Mara got kicked off the basketball team in the first place. But another of the new players is the gorgeous Valentina Cortez, whom Mara has been crushing on since forever. Surely, it wouldn’t hurt her to give the girls a little coaching — especially since the male coaches seem entirely uninterested in teaching the newcomers any of the basics they need to succeed. As Mara gets closer to the other girls, she starts to question her own preconceptions and prejudices, even as she battles the same from the hostile people around her.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/08/12/like-other-girls-by-britta-lundin/

Aug 11 2021

The House on Marshland by Louise Glück

In her note at the start of The First Four Books of Poems, Louise Glück writes of her goals before and after The House on Marshland: “After Firstborn, I set myself the task of making poems as single sentences, having found myself trapped in fragments. After The House on Marshland, I tried to wean myself from conspicuous syntactical quirks and a recurring vocabulary—what begins as vision degenerates into mannerism.” In the thirty-five poems in this collection, divided into two sections — “All Hallows” and “The Apple Trees — there are indeed fewer fragments, though few of them are complete in a single sentence. The occasional ellipsis leaves its sentence open to further possibilities, and she remains fond of the held breath of the em dash. Fewer of these poems have scorpion’s tail that struck me about Firstborn; maybe seven more years of practicing poetry had given her more confidence in her full creations and less of a need to reverse them in a line or two at the end.

House on Marshland by Louise Glück

The poems in “All Hallows” are not all autumnal, though the title poem and “To Autumn” certainly are, while “The Magi,” “Nativity Poem,” and “Flowering Plum” bring other seasons to mind. “Gemini,” pairs with “Nativity Poem,” perhaps. “Jeanne D’Arc” and “Departure” face each other, though the former’s departure is both more permanent and more exalted than the latter’s.

The second section, “The Apple Trees” brings more places, love poems, unhappy poems, and the only work that runs more than one page, “Abishag,” which draws on the biblical story of King David and a young woman called to keep him warm in his old age.

I can see the craft in these works, see Glück stretching her range, writing about objects near and people mythical, writing about lovers so close to her speakers and intimate figures in their lives grown distant — but the poems have not really stuck with me. Which is fine.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/08/11/the-house-on-marshland-by-louise-gluck/

Aug 10 2021

Magical History Tour #4: The Crusades by Fabrice Erre & Sylvain Savoia

If I’m being perfectly honest, I did not go into this book with the highest of expectations. Papercutz is not the most culturally sensitive of publishers (and not in a malicious way, just in a, perhaps, homogenous viewpoints sort of way,) so I was definitely braced for the worst as a Muslim reader and mom.

So it was a pleasant surprise to discover the even tone and dry humor of this terrific kid-friendly examination of the wars that roiled Europe and the Middle East/North Africa for three centuries. Our modern-day narrators are Annie and Nico. Annie is an excellent storyteller and guide as she explains to the younger Nico the ins and outs, dates and places, people and anecdotes of the many engagements that formed the Crusades (tho she does skip mentioning the Children’s Crusade, which is probably for the best.) I learned so much more about the Crusades than I’d known before reading this slender volume, in large part due to how Annie cleanly and simply broke it all down for Nico. The language used is very easy to follow, with definitions included for tougher words. Kudos to translator Joseph Laredo for making the text sound as if it was actually written in English instead of the original French!

Sylvain Savoia’s wonderful art complements Fabrice Erre’s thoughtful script perfectly, with clean lines and a delightful expressiveness that lends a playfulness to what could otherwise feel like heavy going. He’s the kind of artist whose drawings you can hear, even though/while the script is saying lots of other interesting things, too. It’s a combination of eloquence that really serves the material well.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/08/10/magical-history-tour-4-the-crusades-by-fabrice-erre-sylvain-savoia/

Aug 09 2021

The Unspoken Name by A.K. Larkwood

A.K. Larkwood delivers her readers into a deliciously pulpy setting right from the start: “In the deep wilds of the north, there is a Shrine cut into the mountainside. The forest covers these hills like a shroud. This is a quiet country, but the Shrine of the Unspoken One is quieter still. Birds and insects keep away from the place.” (p. 3) The Shrine itself is untended, but down below there is a considerable temple complex ruled by a Prioeress. The temple, known as the House of Silence, holds sway over the surrounding villages, drawing many of its acolytes from the area and every fourteen years commanding one daughter who will grow up to be the Chosen Bride of the Unspoken One. In the spring of her fourteenth year she is at the head of a procession from the House of Silence up to the Shrine. She leads a calf; behind them on the path to the Shrine are the Prioress and the other devotees of the temple. The Chosen Bride sacrifices the calf on an altar outside of the Shrine, collecting some of its blood into a ritual vessel. “She takes the bowl of blood. She climbs the steps to the Shrine. She is never seen again.” (p. 4)

One month before her appointment with the Unspoken One, Csorwe (the book’s pronunciation guide says her name is not spoken in the Hungarian fashion — the first two letters are instead sounded as “ks” — but I did it anyway) receives a visitor, a pilgrim seeking the boon of prophecy from the Chosen Bride. She grants it, as she is obliged to do, and what follows allows Larkwood to show how real and present the gods of this setting are. “The presence of the Unspoken One crept in slowly at first, like the first reaching wavelets of the tide, rising gently, prying into the burrows of sand-creeping things. And then all at once it was impossible to ignore: a vast invisible pressure, a single focused curiosity that weighed her with impersonal hunger.” (p. 6) The pilgrim wishes to know about the Reliquary of Pentravesse. Possessed by her god, Csorwe gives information that is true but not immediately useful, as happens so often with prophecies. It is not immediately apparent to readers, but that encounter, and the events leading up to it, shape much of the rest of The Unspoken Name.

Csorwe enters the Shrine a month later, in accordance with custom. Quite out of accordance with custom, however, she is not alone there. Or rather, she and the Unspoken One are not the only presences in the Shrine. The pilgrim, a man named Belthandros Sethennai, has arrived ahead of her. She is appalled. He is amused. She struggles with the blasphemous idea of living beyond fourteen. He says she does not have to die.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/08/09/the-unspoken-name-by-a-k-larkwood/

Aug 08 2021

A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik

Naomi Novik opens A Deadly Education with what ought to be a perfect narrative hook: “I decided Orion needed to die after the second time he saved my life.” (p, 3) Who’s speaking? Who’s Orion? Why does the narrator want to kill him? And why the second time he saved the narrator’s life? The narrator is El (short for Galadriel, but she almost never tells anyone that) Higgins; Orion is Orion Lake; and they are both students at the Schoolomance, a magic school in England that was purpose-built in the late 1800s to meet the peculiar characteristics of magic use in the slightly alternate history that Novik has set up to make her story go.

A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik

Magic uses mana, which can be built up through effort or taken from the life force of other living things. Unfortunately, the world is also full of monsters, maleficaria, who love to feast on mana and even more so on the magicians who wield it. “Thanks to my freshman year Maleficaria Studies textbook, I know that our deliciousness goes up another order of magnitude every six months between thirteen and eighteen, all wrapped up inside a thin and easy-to-break sugar shell instead of the tough chewy hide of a grown wizard. That’s not a metaphor I made up myself: it’s straight out of the book, which took a lot of pleasure telling us in loads of detail just how badly the maleficaria want to eat us: really, really badly.” (p. 18)

Wizard parents send their teens off to the Schoolomance, whence a large share of them will never return, because the odds of living to adulthood without the protections offered by the school are even lower. About ninety-five percent lower, as El tells her readers. The school was built by Manchester artificers of the Edwardian era. It is something like a pocket dimension with accommodations for all students, classrooms, labs, cafeteria, and so forth. It has a guiding intelligence that offers the students lessons but also does things like makes the spell that they most need to learn next only available in a language that they have barely begun to comprehend. The school’s defenses ensure that monstrous attacks are merely commonplace, as opposed to continuous.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/08/08/a-deadly-education-by-naomi-novik/

Aug 05 2021

The Wild Ones by Nafiza Azad

I really enjoyed the feminist lessons of this novel — girls, don’t be afraid to be angry, to be wild, to scream! — but oh my goodness, did I want to take a red pencil to the fantasy aspects and just tighten everything up so it all fit into its own internal logic!

Centuries ago, young Paheli was sold by her mother to a rich man who raped her. Running away from her horrible violation, she crossed paths with a beaten boy who had stars in his eyes, who threw her a box of jewels before running away. She pressed a jewel to her hand and it sank in, allowing her to open doors to the Beyond, a sort of magical passageway bordering the human realm, where fantastical creatures known as Middle Worlders could traverse between cities without worrying about things like distance and time. As the decades pass, Paheli gathers a group of teenage girls much like herself, all of whom have been betrayed by their parents and abused. To the Middle World they are known as The Wild Ones, a roving pack of girls whose screams can short circuit the brains of Middle Worlders and humans alike.

When they find out that the boy who first gave Paheli, and by extension the rest of them, abilities is in desperate need of their help, they barely hesitate to come to his aid. Tho Paheli has been searching for him for years — if not for an explanation, then at the very least to thank him for his mysterious, life-changing gift — Taraana has proven elusive. Now they discover why: he’s been held prisoner by the Keeper of the Waterways of Uttar Pradesh, one of the most powerful magic-wielders of their time, who has been torturing the younger man in order to farm his tears for their undiluted magic. Once, long ago, Taraana managed to flee with the box collecting his crystallized sorrow, and gave them to a strange girl for safekeeping before being captured again. He’s escaped once more, and hopes the girls can help him figure out a way to stay free.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/08/05/the-wild-ones-by-nafiza-azad/

Aug 03 2021

The Dead And The Dark by Courtney Gould

I was genuinely creeped out by parts of this horror/mystery tale, which is saying a lot because most horror novels don’t scare me at all! Courtney Gould certainly knows how to build tension, even if I wasn’t 100% convinced by the Big Bad-related world-building. The rest of it, tho, is pretty great, especially in its examination of the realities of being gay in the 21st century.

Logan Ortiz-Woodley is looking forward to turning 18 in a scant few months so she can finally leave her parents behind and go live her best life. It’s not that she doesn’t get along with Dad, as she calls Alejo Ortiz, but after a weird experience filming their reality ghost-hunting show in Tulsa, she’s given up on trying to connect with her other father, whom she just calls by his first name. Brandon Woodley has always been the quieter, more awkward one of her dads, and while the odd couple vibes work well on TV, his detachment from his home life has always deeply hurt Logan, who can’t help feeling unwanted when he constantly pushes her away.

So she’s not really fussed when Brandon’s plan to scout locations in his hometown of Snakebite, Oregon stretches from the original one month timetable to six. She feels bad for Dad, who misses his husband, but she’s secretly glad not to have to endure the painful conversations that are all Brandon seems to know how to use to interact with her. It’s worse because he’s always so easy and happy with Dad, making her feel like even more of a pariah in her own family.

When Brandon finally tells them he’s ready for them to come to Snakebite, Logan is far more reluctant than Dad to leave their life in cosmopolitan, queer-friendly Los Angeles. Even so, she’s astonished to find that Snakebite is even worse than she’d imagined. Brandon and Alejo both came from there but left after the homophobia became too much for them. Things haven’t changed very much in the decade plus they’ve been away, but there has been one horrifying new development. Shortly after Brandon arrived in town, a local boy named Tristan went missing.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/08/03/the-dead-and-the-dark-by-courtney-gould/

Aug 02 2021

Lola’s Super Club #2: My Substitute Teacher Is A Witch by Christine Beigel & Pierre Foiullet

I liked Volume 2 of Lola’s Super Club a bit more than Vol 1, tho I think that’s due in large part to being more prepared for the absurdist humor of this title, which may or may not be to everyone’s taste. Overall, I think the quality of both art and gags were better here, perhaps due to the topics each of the two stories included chose to focus on.

In the first story of the volume, Lola Darkhair is on her way to school in Friendly Falls, with a backpack full of the other members of her Super Club. Her classmates are excited to meet her little friends, but disaster strikes: a mean substitute teacher takes over and has extremely unrealistic expectations of the students. Odder still, she introduces a new student to the class, who happens to be her son, supervillain Max Imum. Lola, the Super Club and her classmates will have to join forces to defeat the wicked Mini Mum and her monstrous allies.

The second story, in timely fashion, revolves around the Evilympics, an event dreamed up by Mini Mum to pit the Super Club of Friendly Falls against the Villains of Fiendish Falls. In several creatively mashed up events such as Dodgeboat, Weightlifting Ping Pong, and Rhythmic Equestrian, the two teams must compete for the championship, while Mini Mum does her best to sabotage the scoring. Fortunately, Lola’s sports-loving if presently wheelchair-bound Grampy is there to help save the day.

I think my favorite part of this volume was the lesson Lola learned in villains being made not born, as you can see how Mini Mum’s behavior led her son to his life of crime. It was also nice to see Lola spend time with her grandpa, and for his disability to play a pivotal role in her team’s victory. The wittiness of the mashed up events of the Evilympics were one of the most amusing parts of this book for me, tho I could definitely have done with more of an introduction to the many of Lola’s friends who suddenly appear to help her compete. I was also not the biggest fan of the gross-out humor, and heaven save me from the preview of Astro Mouse And Light Bulb Vol I which amped that up even more. Some kids love this stuff, but I never have at any age.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/08/02/lolas-super-club-2-my-substitute-teacher-is-a-witch-by-christine-beigel-pierre-foiullet/

Jul 30 2021

What I Like About Me by Jenna Guillaume

I stayed up way past my bedtime to finish this charming, body positive tale of a 16 year-old at an inflection point in her life, trying to figure out what’s going on with her parents, her best friend, her sister, the boy she thinks she loves and the boy she most definitely does not love, over one tumultuous summer vacation.

Maisie Martin is worried that her parents are headed for a divorce as Mom takes her and her best friend Anna to Cobbers Bay for their traditional long Christmas break, leaving Dad at home. Dad claims to be absolutely swamped at work, but the fights and the silences and the ignored phone calls indicate a far deeper problem than just a busy newspaper season. Maisie tries to push her parents’ relationship out of the foreground of her mind by focusing on helping cheer up Anna, whose boyfriend Dan just cheated on her. But when Anna develops a connection with Sebastian, the childhood friend Maisie has loved for years but whom she can barely talk to for nerves nowadays, Maisie is left questioning everything she knows about relationships.

Luckily, she has her Discovery Journal to help her sort through this mess. Initially reluctant to do what’s essentially a homework assignment, she finds that writing about her day is surprisingly therapeutic, and confides in the journal things she doesn’t even want to say out loud. This is especially helpful when she ends up joining the Cobbers Bay Miss Teen Queen Beauty Pageant, the same one her beautiful, slender older sister won three years ago, right about when the girls stopped talking to one another. Maisie has felt fat and unlovely for years — not helped by her image-conscious mother — but will this summer and a beauty pageant, of all things, help her learn to love herself?

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/07/30/what-i-like-about-me-by-jenna-guillaume/