Jun 02 2021

Scorpion by Christian Cantrell

What if Christopher Nolan’s Tenet was less in love with itself and the magic of cinematography, and just decided to tell a more interesting story? That’s basically what you have here with Christian Cantrell’s Scorpion, as a CIA analyst discovers that a serial assassin she’s been pursuing might have far stranger motivations than she’d ever dreamed.

Quinn Mitchell is one of American intelligence’s finest minds, but her personal life has gone to hell. After the death of her young daughter and the subsequent implosion of her marriage, her entire life is devoted to work, seeking to protect the world from the nuclear terrorism that, in this novel, wiped out Seoul some years earlier. As is the way with government-funded agencies, her taskforce has become so successful that it’s no longer deemed necessary. Thus Quinn is given a brand new assignment: analyze the data behind a string of bizarre murders worldwide, all differing in method and type of victim but linked by the presence of a 4-digit number marked on each corpse by the killer.

In this she’s aided by her new boss’ main Tech Guy, the brilliant if complicated Henrietta Yi. Henrietta left academia after making a major discovery at the Large Hadron Collider, and joined the CIA out of a desire to use what she found to help prevent more of the disasters that claimed her parents’ lives. But the more she learns about her boss’ designs, the more she wants out, and soon she and Quinn are engaged in a deadly dance through time and space to do what each woman believes will save the world.

This was kind of a weird book that I feel meant well, with great diversity and representation, yet came across to me as deeply unsympathetic to its main characters despite going through the motions of propping them up as Strong Female Characters. Quinn and Henrietta both lean heavily on the sociopathic end of the spectrum — which I usually think makes for great reading! — but Henrietta’s story, at least, petered out in a way that felt more confusing than otherwise, especially since the bit about the tags in Quinn’s breast after her cancer treatment was never fully explained. Despite having so many similar points of interest in common with the main characters — motherhood! Pokemon collecting! being too smart for my own good! — I felt like they were less fully rounded people than collections of quirks in a skin suit. A large part of this may be due to how rushed the ending chapters felt. I still don’t understand Quinn’s change of heart, and am hoping it’s not just because she realized that she really hates her dad.

Time travel narratives are always difficult tho, so if you like a bit of Day Of The Jackal hijinks thrown in to your sci-fi, with the romance levels dialed down to low, then you could do much worse than this intriguing genre mash-up. It’s 100% better a use of your time than watching Tenet, anyway (which I had to do for Hugo voting this year, so thanks for nothing, fellow Hugo nominators.)

Scorpion by Christian Cantrell was published May 25 2021 and is available from all good booksellers, including

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/06/02/scorpion-by-christian-cantrell/

Jun 01 2021

Honeycomb by Joanne M. Harris & Charles Vess

What a sumptuous delight of a novel that greatly satisfied both the craftsman and the girl-in-search-of-the-fantastic living inside me! Joanne M Harris has turned her considerable talents to a mosaic novel crafted as a compendium of fairy tales that are both wildly original yet hearken back to the tales we already know, usually giving the reader a deft twist if not outright sting in the tail. And that’s to be expected from a book featuring bees, which can provide sweetness or pain, as the stories here do too.

It’s kinda hard to explain what the book is about beyond format. The tales are generally centered on the Lacewing King, the aloof, stubborn and often cruel ruler of the Silken Folk, as the fairies of this universe are called. Book 1 sets out his birth and misadventures, including his battle with his great enemy Harlequin. Book 2 puts the Lacewing King on a collision course with the modern world, where he must be rescued by the Barefoot Princess who loves him and who will cheat Death himself in search of reunion. It’s a remarkably clever construct, as if all the fairy tales in the world were really about one cast of characters whose paths intersect and diverge as decades pass and people both meet and move on. Ms Harris does a terrific job of building a golden scaffolding from which to hang her stories, like a honeycomb connecting worlds with worlds, as she herself says in the proceedings.

The only part of the stories that I didn’t understand was who the Hallowe’en King was looking for when he originally went into the domain of Death. Allegedly, he was looking for his lost love, but afaik she was alive and hale the whole time? Someone please feel free to explain this part to me.

Charles Vess’ wonderful line drawings bring the stories to lush, romantic life, as is his specialty. My favorite of the many gorgeous illustrations in this book is probably the one of the Moth Queen and the girl who loved to dance, tho the tale of the out-of-place mermaid comes in a very close second. Mr Vess truly is our modern-day Arthur Rackham, and a literary treasure.

But most of all, I loved how the stories here in Honeycomb managed to capture the whimsy and darkness both of traditional fairy tales while infusing a very modern sensibility to it all. Diverse representation is the norm, with the only misstep I felt — and this is truly minor in the grander scheme of things — being a dig at beautiful women who want to save wolves from extinction. Sure, no one likes being eaten by wolves, and it’s silly to think that wolves are harmless, but there’s definitely a case to be made for keeping ecosystems intact, and that includes not hunting apex predators to extinction. Otherwise, these fairy tales were deeply satisfying both to my intellect and to my psyche, feeling less created by Ms Harris than conveyed, in the manner of all true and epic tales.

Honeycomb by Joanne M. Harris & Charles Vess was published May 25 2021 by Gallery/Saga Press and is available from all good booksellers, including

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/06/01/honeycomb-by-joanne-m-harris-charles-vess/

May 31 2021

The Relentless Moon by Mary Robinette Kowal

The Relentless Moon, the third book in Mary Robinette Kowal’s Lady Astronauts series, changes locales and first-person narrator from the first two books, The Calculating Stars and The Fated Sky. Nicole Wargin is also one of the original astronauts, and in early 1963 as The Relentless Moon opens, she is both an old Moon hand and the wife of the governor of Kansas, the new center of America’s space industry.

The Relentless Moon by Mary Robinette Kowal

Though the lunar settlement is firmly established with flights to and from nearly routine, and the first Mars expedition nearly halfway to its destination, opposition to devoting so much of humanity’s resources to spaceflight — and eventual evacuation of as many people as possible as Earth becomes increasingly uninhabitable — is growing. The book’s first scene is a political reception in Kansas City, the new capital of America, interrupted by gunfire through the windows of the room where the reception is taking place. The militantly anti-space group Earth First soon claims responsibility. Unsettlingly, evidence mounts that Earth First has sympathizers in both the American government and the International Aerospace Coalition (IAC), the global body governing spaceflight.

The overarching structure of the book is a search for the person or persons who could be behind most of the mechanical problems plaguing IAC launches and the American spaceport in Kansas. Kowal does not set up The Relentless Moon as a tightly-crafted whodunit; instead, she tells it as people going through their daily lives, working, striving, hanging on. It’s just that their daily work is in space or on the moon, an environment dangerous enough without someone trying to make it deadlier still while remaining undetected so as to keep doing damage.

In her afterword, Kowal says “When I wrote this book, COVID-19 didn’t exist.” (p. 541) It’s a little uncanny, then, that one of the major complications of The Relentless Moon is that polio gets transmitted to the Moon. In the Lady Astronauts timeline, Jonas Salk and his whole institute were wiped out by the Meteor. A polio vaccine is just coming into use, and people are resisting its use. Polio is contagious and deadly. The measures that the characters have to take on the Moon are familiar: isolation, quarantine, treatment with limited resources and an incomplete understanding of the disease.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/05/31/the-relentless-moon-by-mary-robinette-kowal/

May 29 2021

Die Jugendstreiche des Knaben Karl by Karl Valentin

The editors of the Süddeutsche Zeitung began their series of 20 books in or involving Munich with a local icon, Siegfried Sommer. They finished the set with Karl Valentin, who was born in Munich and grew up in the city but went on to become a national icon as a comedic star on stage, in silent films, and in the talkies. He has sometimes been called the Charlie Chaplin of Germany, and he was a formative influence on Bertolt Brecht.

Jugendstreiche des Knaben Karl

In Die Jugendstreiche des Knaben Karl (The Youthful Pranks of the Boy Karl), Valentin recounts 92 pages worth of short anecdotes from his childhood and apprentice years, with just a few towards the end from when he started working on stage in 1902, the year he turned 20. I presume that his stage and screen presence contributed substantially to his comedy because I found very few of the tales in the book to be funny.

Valentin comes close to acknowledging as much at various points in the book. After describing various things that the young terrors did to animals in the neighborhood, or how they used animals to shock, surprise or annoy people, he wonders why kids don’t naturally have more love for animals. (p. 18) Some stories have particularly unhappy endings. He tells of the excitement of skating across thin ice on the river Isar one winter, the kids telling each other not to be a mama’s boy. They barely make it across, but Valentin’s friend Ade says, “Get out of the way, I’m doing it again!” Valentin follows; the ice breaks; Ade goes under. “I break through as well, but I was able to stop, boards were passed to me, I am rescued. My comrade Ade is taken out the next day as a corpse. He’s buried in the East Cemetery. He caught his death and I caught bad asthma that’s with me to this day.” (p. 9)

The anecdotes are all quite short, and may have been among the stories that Valentin told from the stage. Few are more than a page; most pages have two or three items. Valentin groups them thematically, and more generally chronologically. Headings include “Explosive effects,” “The Terrors of the Au” (a Munich neighborhood), “What a Circus,” “School Stories,” and “Smelly Bits.” The section titled “Mother’s Fears” has six anecdotes over three pages. The first is about two-year-old Karl hammering on his mother’s Renaissance furniture. Next comes an item about how he got his head stuck and had to be sawed out by a passing workman. Speaking of saws, the third is about how he tricked his mother into thinking he had been injured by a circular saw as a carpenter’s apprentice. Hilarity does not ensue in the other three either.

Here’s one that I did like, from later in the book when he was already working with his long-time cabaret partner Liesl Karlstadt:

One time my partner bought a pound of plums at the Vittles’ Market [in downtown Munich]. Then we both got on a tram, but acted as if we didn’t know each other. At one point she spoke to me: “Look at this, Mr Neighbor, just now at the market I wanted to buy myself pears. But the lady selling fruit made a mistake and instead of pears she gave me apples.” “Oh no, Miss,” I said, “those are not apples, those are some sort of apricot.” “Ach why,” she said, “I didn’t even ask for apricots.” “You know,” I added, “I don’t really know all that much about fruit, maybe those are pienapples or bananas, although they seem a little bit too short for that.” She answered: “Ach, those are definitely not bananas. Oh, I know it now, they’re gooseberries.” “Nah,” I countered, “gooseberries have geese, and what you have in the bag there are all smooth.” … And so the deliberately very dumb discourse kept going. Suddenly an older woman, definitely a Munich sales lady with a big market basket on her lap, stood up and said, “I have to go now, I can’t stand it any more, I’ve never seen two such cows in all my life, they don’t even know what plums are.” (pp. 88–89)

A film version of the book was made in 1977. Judging from the German Wikipedia description of its plot, it has a better framework and probably a better selection of the actually funny bits.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/05/29/die-jugendstreiche-des-knaben-karl-by-karl-valentin/

May 28 2021

Spells Trouble (Sisters of Salem #1) by P.C. Cast & Kristin Cast

I’d never read any books from either of these bestselling authors before I picked up Spells Trouble, but I really love the idea of a mother-daughter duo writing urban fantasies featuring teenage twin sisters who are witches descended from those persecuted at the infamous Salem witch trials.

Hunter and Mercy Goode are on the cusp of their 16th birthdays. They’ve lived in Goodeville all their lives with their Wise Woman, Kitchen Witch mother Abigail. On the night of their 16th birthday Abigail is going to consecrate them to their chosen deities, while reaffirming the protection spell that keeps their town safe from the mythological terrors at their door. You see, Goodeville was founded on a conjunction of five different underworlds, and witch magic is essential to keeping the gateway to each underworld firmly sealed against the monsters that threaten to break loose from their immortal prisons in order to freely prey on mortals.

Trouble is, something goes terribly awry at the consecration ceremony, and Abigail has to sacrifice herself in order to protect her daughters and seal the Norse gate once more. With her dying words, she begs her girls to fortify the gateways, each marked by an unusual tree in a pentagram pattern around the town. Hunter and Mercy must fight through their sorrow, bewilderment and sheer lack of knowledge in order to figure out how to carry out their mother’s wishes, even as a monster lurks, waiting to kill again.

I really dug a lot of the ideas here, and admired how the Casts acknowledge and honor the contributions of Native Americans in/to their magic system. I also liked how the twins were shaped as distinctly different personalities: Hunter is introverted but strong after a young adolescence of being bullied for being a lesbian, while Mercy is light-hearted and kind, if perhaps too enamored of her hot jock boyfriend Kirk. In the face of tragedy, Mercy gets sad while Hunter gets mad, and the friction of their flaws is dealt with a sensitivity that makes for absorbing reading. I also really enjoyed the depictions of their relationships with their best friends and with Kirk, as well as with the delightful Xena.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/05/28/spells-trouble-sisters-of-salem-1-by-p-c-cast-kristin-cast/

May 27 2021

Still Lives by Maria Hummel

I am a total sucker for mysteries set in the art world, so I was already inclined to love this book even before I was seduced by, first, the unusual-for-the-art-world LA/West Coast setting, then by Maria Hummel’s gorgeous prose.

Still Lives follows Maggie Richter, one-time investigative journalist turned PR flack for the prestigious Rocque Museum. She’s dreading their upcoming exhibit by Kim Lord, a painter known for her provocative self-portraits, featuring the artist posing as various female murder victims through American history. The concept has Maggie feeling incredibly queasy, and she’s not the only one at the Rocque to feel that way, tho she’s probably the only one to dread Kim’s show for the entirely personal reason of her ex-boyfriend Greg having very quickly moved on from their relationship to take up with Kim instead.

When Kim is a no-show to her own opening, Maggie is relieved at having avoided another awkward encounter with her and Greg both. But after Kim’s phone and a bloody cloth are found in places that not only suggest foul play but also incriminate Greg in her disappearance, Maggie is drawn into investigating what happened to the missing artist, not only as part of her work at the art museum, but also because of her unresolved feelings for Greg. Helped and hindered in turn by her friends and co-workers, Maggie must navigate not only rarefied art circles, but also her own uncomfortable relationships with LA and her past and the people and feelings she can’t seem to leave behind.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/05/27/still-lives-by-maria-hummel/

May 26 2021

Sunday Funday In Koreatown by Aram Kim

This adorable picture book is a wonderful blend of Richard Scarry and Alexander And The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, from a Korean American perspective. Yoomi is looking forward to Sunday Funday but everything seems to go wrong from the very moment she wakes up. No cartoons, no favorite breakfast, no favorite shirt to wear — and that’s even before she leaves the house! Surely, things will get better once she arrives in Koreatown with her dad for a visit to the shops and to grandma… won’t they?

Teaching the value of perseverance and flexibility, Sunday Funday In Koreatown embroiders on its universal themes with details that lovingly highlight the culture of the Korean diaspora in a way that embraces both readers already familiar with the culture or otherwise. I really enjoyed following along with Yoomi’s day and especially appreciated the recipe for kimbap at the end! My twins ADORED this book. As they’re both cat people — in more senses than one, as my youngest especially sometimes behaves more like a sentient feline than a semi-feral child — their sense of identification with Yoomi and the rest of her cat family was high. This book was perfect for reading aloud and captured their attention from start to finish. My ten year-old read this on his own, ofc, and rated it quite highly. “4.5 stars!” he chirps, while perched on my lap, typing away at his own writing assignment (yes, I am twisted in my office chair to write rn. Yes, this is a very awkward position to type from.)

I love how Aram Kim uses this series to casually incorporate Korean American culture into contemporary children’s literature, showing how to do it in a way that’s wildly entertaining while being respectful both to her people and to young readers. It’s another great book for Asian American Pacific Islander heritage month, and one I’m so pleased to have on my family’s shelves.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/05/26/sunday-funday-in-koreatown-by-aram-kim/

May 25 2021

Rami The Ramadan Cat by Robyn Thomas & Abira Das

The second part of my sister’s Raya book-present-bundle to my eldest, this delightful tale of a lonely young Muslim boy finding friendship through a lost cat was a joy to me and my 10 year-old (and had my perhaps overly-emotional sister in tears, lol.)

Saleem has just moved to a new city and desperately misses the friends and cousins who made up his old social circle. With Ramadan approaching, he also misses all the hustle and preparations that are surely going on where he was from, despite the best efforts of his parents to make up for it. But a lost cat appears in his backyard on the very first night of Ramadan, a cat who takes very quickly to Saleem and his parents. At first Saleem wants so much to keep Rami — nicknamed for the holy month — for himself, but an incident at the mosque makes him realize that the right and responsible thing to do is try to reunite the cat with its own family. But what will Saleem do when his only friend leaves him?

Tho I grumbled a little at the idea that Saleem had no friends despite being in a new school and mosque, I do understand that it can be difficult for some kids to make human friends vs animal. Robyn Thomas’ empathetic, understated tale evokes both the loneliness of the recently displaced as well as the seemingly magical comfort of an animal buddy. I imagine that she and artist Abira Das collaborated closely to ensure that the perfectly suited illustrations showed off the multicultural aspects of Saleem’s household (apple pie and Eid Mubarak balloons!) and neighborhood. It was a breath of fresh air to see a diversity of religions, races and abilities handled so matter-of-factly throughout.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/05/25/rami-the-ramadan-cat-by-robyn-thomas-abira-das/

May 24 2021

The Lights Of Prague by Nicole Jarvis

How to make the now well-worn trope of vampires and monster hunters feel fresh and new again? Set the proceedings in historic Prague, with a firm eye on local history and mythology free of the influence of the too-standard figures of modern, Western-European-leaning pop culture, while also infusing a 21st-century sensibility to the proceedings.

We open on Domek Myska, a lamplighter who takes his responsibilities of keeping night-time Prague safe for pedestrians both seriously and to their logical conclusion. While lamplighters have historically acted as a de facto policing force in many cities, Domek and his fraternity also guard against the literal monsters that haunt Prague, most often in the form of deadly pijavice (the book never uses the word vampire but that’s their closest analog.) When Domek dusts a pijavice one night, the strange urn the monster was carrying transfers itself to his ownership, forcing Domek to reassess not only his abilities and his loyalties, but also to question what it means to be a monster.

To complicate matters further is his relationship with the rich and widowed Lady Ora Fischerova. Beautiful and eccentric, she’s spent long years hiding a secret of her own. Coming back to Prague, however, has unearthed a past that she wants to remain buried yet can’t stay away from. She’s also finding it hard to resist Domek’s aura of solidity and kindness. Will her attractions, to him and to her past ties, prove her undoing?

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/05/24/the-lights-of-prague-by-nicole-jarvis/

May 24 2021

Barracoon by Zora Neale Hurston

In 1808 the United States made the importation of slaves illegal, but illegitimate trade in humans continued until the eve of the Civil War. Supply and demand persisted on both sides of the Atlantic. “Habituated to the lucrative enterprise of trafficking and encouraged by the relative ease with which they could find buyers for their captives, Africans opposed to ending the traffic persisted in the enterprise.” (xviii) Enslaving people had a traditional role in some societies, capturing slaves brought political dominance, and selling them onward brought wealth, which in turn bought more power.

Barracoon by Zora Neale Hurston

“King Ghezo of Dahomey renounced his 1852 treaty to abolish the traffic and by 1857 had resumed his wars and raids. Reports of his activities had reached the newspapers of Mobile, Alabama. A November 9, 1858, article … caught the attention of Timothy Meaher, a ‘slaveholder’ who, like many proslavery Americans, wanted to maintain the trans-Atlantic traffic. In defiance of constitutional law, Meaher decided to import Africans illegally into the country and enslave them. In conspiracy with Meaher, William Foster, who built the Clotilda, outfitted the ship for transport of the ‘contraband cargo.’ In July 1860, he navigated to the Bight of Benin. After six weeks of surviving storms and avoiding being overtaken by ships patrolling the waters, Foster anchored the Clotilda at the port of Ouidah.” (xix)

A young man named Kossola was among the thousands being held in the slave pens in Ouidah. He had been captured in a raid on his home village and brought over land to be sold overseas. He survived the passage on the Clotilda, the last known transport of slaves to the United States. He was enslaved on a farm in Alabama until 1865 when Union troops brought news of his freedom. Thereafter, he lived in a settlement of former slaves known as Africatown (later, Plateau) working as a farmer and a laborer until an accident made him incapable of heavy labor. The community appointed him sexton of the church. That was his occupation when Zora Neale Hurston, then a student of anthropology (she worked with Frank Boas, who also taught Ursula K. Le Guin‘s father), visited Kossola in 1927 and wrote down his history and stories.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/05/24/barracoon-by-zora-neale-hurston/