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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Jul 29 2021

The Follower by Nicholas Bowling

As the parent of twins, I can attest to the fact that twins can be as sweetly devoted yet as deeply strange as the siblings depicted in this novel. After the death of his father, the already rather odd Jesse Owens (yes, really) starts looking for meaning in all the most metaphysical places. His search leads him across an ocean and a continent to the Northern California town of Mount Hookey, where the inhabitants are devoted to the idea of a Crystal City in the mountain, as promised to them by John of Telos, a messianic figure from the 1970s who was enlightened by beings from a place? a race? a state of mind? called, unsurprisingly, Telos.

Since the 70s, any number of schools have sprung up around The Violet Path to Telos, and it’s to these that Jesse has applied his considerable mind and inherited fortune. His twin, Vivian, is used to his strangeness, to his inability to function well in mainstream society. When he goes missing, Vivian knows that it’s up to her to find him and bring him home.

Unfortunately, hippie NorCal is way out of her comfort zone, even before she’s violently mugged in the neighboring town of Lewiston while journeying to Jesse’s last known location. She enters Mount Hookey almost as a drifter, and soon finds herself trying to untangle a bewildering web of New Age offshoots and practitioners in her search for her twin. People are either overly helpful or shy away from her for no reason she can discern, but the one thing most of the residents agree on is that she shouldn’t go up the frigid, forested mountain, and certainly not by herself. But if that’s where Jesse went, Vivian will have no choice but to follow, even if it leads her straight to danger.

For all its brooding weirdness, The Follower is at its heart a satirical examination of New Age cults and the brutally cynical thinking behind them, threaded through with ideas on reaching your potential and what that means in our modern world. Tonally, it feels a lot like The X-Files, with a skeptical Vivian trying to find her much more believing brother in the wilds of the Pacific Northwest, with a little bit of The Simpsons in both the appearance of a mysterious glowing figure and in the absurd, often oblivious humor of the townsfolk. The most touching part, to me, was the examination of family, the bond between siblings as well as the bond between parent and child. Parents don’t mean to ruin their children, mostly. The comparison of Vivian and Jesse’s relationship with their dysfunctional parents to the mindsets of the followers of Telos is thought-provoking, especially as a parent myself.

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Jul 27 2021

The Smurfs Tales #1: The Smurfs And The Bratty Kid by Peyo

I grew up with The Smurfs as a child, tho in all honesty, I was one of those children who barely absorbed the “mythology” of the overarching story vs enjoying the gags of each standalone episode. And while I certainly gobbled up my fair share of Asterix and Tintin comics, I never got into the Smurfs books, or the Johan And Peewit comics from which our little blue heroes originally came.

So I leapt at the opportunity to remedy that oversight in my childhood reading with the repackaging of several of Peyo’s tales, translated by the Papercutz team, here in this inaugural volume published to coincide with the relaunch of the cartoon on Nickelodeon. Comprising a long story about the Smurfs; another long tale starring the Smurfs, Johan and Peewit; a shorter tale about just the humans, and several pages of Smurf gag panels, this was very much a volume out of the Belgian cartooning tradition, with clever, accessible art and a surprisingly wordy narrative that feels geared towards a slightly older audience than the popular TV adaptations.

The first story, the titular The Smurfs And The Bratty Kid, was my favorite of the bunch. Papa Smurf gets lost traveling back to Smurf Village because his stork has no sense of direction, but encounters a kindly old man looking forward to a visit from his nephew Awsum. Unfortunately, Awsum is a holy terror who not only wreaks havoc on Smurf Village but also teams up with Gargamel to capture his would-be benefactors! Papa Smurf will have to use every ounce of his patience, kindness and know-how in order to help guide Awsum to becoming a better person.

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Jul 25 2021

The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin

I loved “The City Born Great,” the 2016 short story (and 2017 Hugo finalist) that was the seed of this novel. “The conceit of the story is that great human cities have a life of their own. Maybe that life awakens quickly, maybe it takes centuries or millennia, but at some point the genius loci becomes a thing in itself. Birth is never easy, not every potential new life makes it into the world, and Jemisin’s story tells the tale of New York’s attempt…”

In its short form, I found the story irresistible: “What makes this story great is the sheer exuberance with which it’s told. It’s fast, it’s furious, but it’s also tremendous fun. And sure, it’s a power fantasy, too, but if that gives readers sentences like ‘I backhand its ass with Hoboken, raining the drunk rage of ten thousand dudebros down on it like the hammer of God. Port Authority makes it honorary New York, motherfucker; you just got Jerseyed.’ then let a thousand fantasies bloom. It’s a story about life, and living, and that’s what it’s most full of: the very stuff of life.”

The City We Became extends and deepens “The City Born Great,” while keeping the essential story: New York wants to live, to become its most vibrant, most colorful self; something else wants to stop that from happening. A slightly revised form of the short story becomes the novel’s prologue. Instead of the battle it depicts marking the birth of the living city, it’s just the opening scene, an incomplete start, leaving the avatar of New York in unknown circumstances and its enemies still active. Each of the boroughs also has an avatar, and together they must complete the tale, though they do not know that from the start. Manny, newly arrived in the city, his past forgotten already, sharp, fast, not averse to controlled violence. Bronca, oldest of the five, daughter of the Lenape who were around when the Dutch came calling, harried administrator of an arts center. Brooklyn Thomason aka MC Free, in her younger days a rapper, now a city councilwoman, Black, formidable, and worried about her family. Padmini Prakash, Queen of Mathematics, immigrant living with her auntie, thrilled to have a chance in New York to use her abilities to their fullest, not so thrilled about all that entails. And then there’s Aislyn Houlihan, teenage daughter of an Irish cop on Staten Island, too afraid to go into the city, wanting more than anything to be left alone in the world she knows.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/07/25/the-city-we-became-by-n-k-jemisin/