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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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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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/

Nov 16 2021

The Queen’s Favorite Witch, Book 1: The Wheel of Fortune by Benjamin Dickson & Rachael Smith

Meet Daisy Sparrow, a young peasant witch living in Elizabethan England. Together with her beloved Mum, she brews and sells potions and other assorted concoctions at market fairs. But she wants more from life than just helping people who probably didn’t need that much help to begin with, even if she’s painfully shy when it comes to showing off her abilities.

When Daisy learns that the Royal Witch has died, and that the queen is looking for someone to fill the now open position, she decides to apply for the job despite the protests of her mother. Mum is afraid that the grandees of Hampton Court will have no time for a witch from such a lowly background, and that even if they do let Daisy compete, that the court will be too much a hotbed of political intrigue for the young girl to survive, much less navigate successfully. Daisy goes anyway, and discovers to her dismay that her mother was mostly right. But a group of unexpected allies will help Daisy get her foot in the door, even as she and the fabled John Dee join forces to defeat an evil conspiracy against the queen.

Moreso even than being a fun alternate history with fantasy elements, this was a really terrific tale of believing in yourself and allowing reason and kindness to guide your actions. Daisy makes a ton of mistakes in her quest to become someone important, but she learns a load of valuable lessons about both herself and what it means to matter in this highly entertaining, surprisingly twisty graphic novel. And, readers, the way I gasped at the last panel reveal! I probably should have seen it coming, but I totally didn’t. I’m very excited to read future volumes in order to see what happens next!

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Nov 15 2021

Upright Women Wanted by Sarah Gailey

Sarah Gailey has long been on my Want-To-Read list, so when I saw their latest novella nominated for a Hugo, I was super excited to finally have the opportunity. Plus, a story about female librarians braving the Wild West to bring books from settlement to settlement? Sign me up!

Upright Women Wanted certainly delivers on the setting and premise. Esther runs away from a constrained life where she’s expected to marry a man who views her more as a possession than a person, after her best friend Beatriz is hanged for subversion. She stows away in the back of a library wagon, to the consternation of the librarians who discover her several days later. While Esther thought she was joining an ascetic group of patriots, therefore fulfilling her societal duties even while running away from her immediate familial ones, the librarians are actually far more subversive than she ever dreamed… or hoped.

At first, it’s just a matter of learning how to get along and do the job, as the librarians — Bet, Leda and Cye — reluctantly agree to let Esther ride with them to the nearest free city as long as she pulls her weight on their wagon train. But when a scheduled pick-up and delivery turns into something far more dangerous for all of them, with entire towns setting up against the librarians, Esther finds herself reevaluating what she truly wants and how far she’s willing to go to get it.

I think I would have liked this novella a lot more if Esther weren’t such a ditz. Like, I get that her ex wasn’t possessive, but it still felt way too soon for Esther to start lusting after someone else so quickly after her ex so violently died. I also wasn’t a fan of her falling in “love” with someone who was just mean to her at every turn. But, you know, I get that different people have different love personalities, and that’s fine. I could definitely appreciate how Esther struggled with the instincts of her upbringing, and how she appreciated the lessons Amity had to offer. But what I couldn’t forgive was the absolute idiocy of Amity risking the entire subversive system, and for what? The ability to brazenly ride past a checkpoint? Gtfoh.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/11/15/upright-women-wanted-by-sarah-gailey/

Nov 14 2021

Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino

I read Invisible Cities ages ago when I worked for a bookstore in Atlanta and was reading more consciously literary things. I picked it up again recently thanks to a Twitter thread. Jo Walton had been doing a series of 50 manipulated images of Venice. As she wrote, “In honour of Italo Calvino’s Le Citta Invisibile, which is visions of fifty cities [there are 55, actually] that are all Venice, I’m going to post a different version of this photo every day.” David M. Perry, a journalist and historian, chimed in with

Kublai: Why don’t you talk about Venice, Marco
Polo: I’ve been talking about Venice the whole time

… is a moment that shapes my whole approach to medieval urban history.

He added, “Novel pitch: Invisible Cities but with more wizard shit.” Ada Palmer, no stranger to big ideas in literature, was succinct in her enthusiasm: “Sold!” Hello, writing prompt. In the meantime, I have read the book again.

Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino

Invisible Cities was published in Italian in 1972 and in English in 1974. The conceit of the book is that Marco Polo is describing to Kublai Khan cities within the Khan’s empire that Polo has visited. The Khan knows that his empire is too vast for him to apprehend it all himself; therefore, he relies on messengers to bring him reports from across his lands, telling him what he needs to know but cannot discover on his own. “Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions, but the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening to the young Venetian with greater attention and curiosity than he shows any other messenger or explorer of his.” (Ch. 1) Following the framing introduction are Polo’s reports of cities within the Khan’s realm, or at least that is how they appear initially.

In the first chapter, there are ten such reports. Each city is named and discussed, and each is also placed within a thematic group such as the four from the first chapter: “Cities & Memory,” “Cities & Desire,” “Cities & Signs,” and “Thin Cities.” There are eleven groups, and each group appears five times, for a total of 55 cities described within the book. These are occasionally punctuated by direct conversations between Polo and Kublai Khan. The themes follow a strict mathematical progression within the book, giving the whole a structure that is at once rigid and playful. Readers may progress through the book as written, or they may follow one of the thematic threads; they could easily read Invisible Cities in a different order altogether.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/11/14/invisible-cities-by-italo-calvino/

Nov 13 2021

Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark

It’s 1922 and the Ku Klux Klan is marching in Macon, Georgia. The Klan I know from history is bad enough, but the Klan in Ring Shout is supplemented by literal monsters that Clark’s first-person narrator Maryse Boudreaux and her friends Sadie and Chef can see through the human form that the Ku Kluxes have taken on as camouflage. The three can see the monsters, with an aim toward killing them. Sadie, youngest of the friends, has deadeye aim with her trusty Winchester rifle and almost preternatural speed in reloading. Chef is a dab hand with explosives, adding the bits of silver and iron that should banish the Kluxes from this world after the gunpowder or dynamite has scattered their bits. And Maryse has a song that sings — “a silver hilt joined to smoke that moves like black oil before dripping away. The flat, leaf-shaped blade it leaves behind is almost half my height, with designs cut into the dark iron. Visions dance in my head as they always do when the sword comes: a man pounding out silver with raw, cut-up feet in a mine in Peru; a woman screaming and pushing out birth blood in the bowels of a slave ship; a boy, wading to his chest in a rice field in the Carolinas. … People dead now for Lord knows how long. Their spirits are drawn to the sword, and I can hear them chanting—different tongues mixing into a harmony that washes over me, settling onto my skin. It’s them that compel the ones bound to the blade—the chiefs and kings who sold them away—to call on old African gods to rise up, and dance in time to the song.” (Ch. 1)

Ring Shout by P. Djeli Clark

The three have set a trap for some Ku Kluxes, things that when they shed their human facade are “easily nine feet tall, with legs that bend back like the hindquarters of a beast, joined to a long torso twice as wide as most men. Arms of thick bone and muscle just from its shoulders, stretching to the ground. But it’s the head that stands out—long and curved to end in a sharp bony point. … Every bit of the thing is a pale bone white, down to claws like carved blades of ivory. The only part not white are the eyes. Should be six in all: beads of red on black in rows of threes on either side of that curving head.” (Ch. 1) They bait it with a dead dog, something they know from experience will draw the Kluxes. But the bomb inside the dog only maims the Kluxes, and they come after the threesome, leading to a desperate combat in the cotton warehouse where the three women had been observing events.

One thing leads to another, and the main story of Ring Shout is off to the races: the increasing number of Kluxes means that something greater than just a march and local racial oppression is afoot. The hate that the Klan lets in may open the world to domination by powers greater than human. Clark deftly weaves together his characters’ backgrounds, especially Maryse’s, the increasing threat that they are facing, the forms of magic present in the world, and the ways that people find joy in life amid all of the tribulations. His description is lush, the images striking and sometimes horrific. The Ku Kluxes are not the worst things taking an interest in human doings. Maryse has allies; while she wields the sword, she is not the most important person in the organized resistance to the Klan. That would be Nana Jean, a venerable Gullah woman who can call on many forms of magic, and who has also enlisted science on her side. Maryse also has periodic access to three Aunties, who live on another plane of existence and who first gave her the sword. They are powerful but enigmatic, and their ability to intervene directly is limited.

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Nov 12 2021

Come Tumbling Down (Wayward Children #5) by Seanan McGuire

Seanan McGuire can be so hit or miss for me, and this one was, unfortunately, another miss. But it was a very near-miss, and one that could easily have been a hit, as I love Jack Wolcott and was panting to read this story of her continuing adventures.

Last we’d seen, Jack had taken the corpse of her twin sister Jill back to The Moors to be resurrected. Christopher took over Jack’s old room in the basement of Eleanor West’s School for Wayward Children so is thus the only person on hand for the extravagant yet fleeting appearance of a new doorway there. Two people emerge from the lightning-generated door before it promptly disappears again. Astute readers will instantly recognize Alexis, Jack’s beloved. But who is the damaged burden she carries, swathed in one of the floaty dresses Jill loved so much as a disciple of her vampiric Master?

Turns out, mad scientist Jack did succeed in resurrecting her sister, for which good deed Jill has punished her by swapping their bodies and trying to kill her all over again. Jill has been pushed further into derangement by the knowledge that the body she was born into is no longer fit to be turned vampiric: as it’s already been killed, the vampire’s curse will no longer be able to turn it immortal. Her solution has been to steal Jack’s body for herself, leaving obsessive-compulsive Jack to suffer in a form that Jack knows has been stained with the blood of far too many innocents to ever be scrubbed truly clean.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/11/12/come-tumbling-down-wayward-children-5-by-seanan-mcguire/